


A Stoop To A Rake

by AJHall



Series: The Queen of Gondal [16]
Category: Gondal - Bronte children, Life on Mars (UK), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate History, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 11:59:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2651264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charis plays a dangerous game and realises too late that the stakes are far higher than she imagined. Now only her wits, her nerve and her gambler’s instincts stand between her and the Pretender’s plans for the three kingdoms. And she is very far into enemy territory, and feels so very, very alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to caulkhead for betaing and shezan for important suggestions as to plot advancement. Readers' attention is specifically drawn to the overall [ series advisory note ](https://archiveofourown.org/series/7681).

In Gondal they called it the Trojan wind: an arid, unpredictable south-easterly, harbinger of stifling summer nights, of tossing on mattresses seemingly stuffed with thistles and praying for the elusive relief of dawn.

A gust laid low the potted rosebush, scattering dark petals over the roof walk. Charis stooped to pick one up, brushing its velvet across her lips, inhaling its scent. Long after nightfall, the leads still radiated the day’s stored heat. Between that and the wind’s desiccation the petals would have withered by dawn. 

_The Trojan wind_. What had they called it in Troy? Had Helen stood on the leads of Priam’s palace, looking west, yearning for Sparta (and perhaps, just perhaps, for Menelaos, also) and felt it on her back?

She blinked back tears. There was grit in the wind, as well as two and and half thousand years of sorrow and exile. 

The roaring of men in their cups came up from the banqueting chamber two floors below. A lush baritone rang out above the clamour, unmistakeable even amid chaos.

“A toast! Gentlemen – to other men’s wives!”

Charis’s mouth filled with ash. She gripped the balustrade and leaned over. The drop turned her stomach. Fifty feet, onto stone. But it would be quick. As for what came after, she had surrendered all hope of grace by coming here. What difference would the manner of her death make? They would bury her at a cross-roads, she would moulder into dust and even her name would be lost.

She hitched at her skirts with her left hand, cursing her petticoats and the new French stays. Despite their hindrance, she had managed to get her knee onto the parapet when, from out of the shadows, someone spoke.

“I _told_ you what he’s like. You’re the one who didn’t listen. But if you want to get out of here without having to be scraped off the cobbles and carried away in buckets, I can show you how. If you aren’t still too proud to take help, that is.”

* * *

The end of the Cock o’ the North fair heralded a period of clear blue skies with light, cooling breezes. Phyllis, accordingly, decreed that all the world should be cleansed. Every scrap of fabric in the castle would be taken out, reviewed for moths, aired, cleaned, repaired and generally refettled, before the enervating heats and dusts of high summer rendered all such projects impracticable. 

The Great Wash swept over Castle Cavron. The girls of the district were pressed into service as extra laundresses and every youth who could be spared from the fields set to work carrying bales and stirring pans of soap. All flat surfaces were given over to pressing, bleaching, stretching, crimping, pleating or goffering. Garments hung drying from every projection. The air hung with steam and the stink of lye, was loud with the methodical thud and slap of linens being beaten clean. The Castellan, with several casks of wine and as many of his officers as could wangle leave, bolted down the valley to “discuss strategy” with the officers of Sherlock’s regiments.

The last note fell out of a pile of freshly laundered linen, placed in her bedchamber during morning service. As she absorbed its contents Charis’s heart thumped erratically. All that had gone before had been a story, a make-believe, a game of hints and half-promises she could drop at will once it ceased to amuse. Not this. She knew this for the challenge it was.

_Show cards or fold._

Unlike its predecessors the note was enciphered, using a simple letter substitution. She clutched at the bedpost to remain upright. When she’d been eight years old Lord Lestrade, newly appointed ensign in the Household Guard, had entranced her with messages in that very cipher.

_Tomorrow. Noon. St Cecelia’s Well. Should aught hinder our meeting, leave word within the knot-hole below the fifth angel on the decani side of the church._

Charis bit her lip. The words from a remembered lecture rang in her mind:

 _Even without more, the presence of a cipher denotes a plot. Disguise your messages as something innocent or use a book code. Only an imbecile or a traitor uses an obvious cipher._

The very _last_ voice she wanted to hear in her head at this moment. 

She shook her head. None of that. It was charming Lord Lestrade had reminded her of shared memories. Only nerves had prompted her to take his use of the cipher awry. It would all be forgotten once they met again.

_Tomorrow. Noon. St Cecelia’s Well._

* * *

Her lady of the bedchamber snuffled and snorted on her pallet, locked in a drugged stupor, fruit of her own greed and dishonesty. If only Charis had thought earlier of lacing her private store of spiced confits with powdered opium. She’d suspected the woman for weeks of pilfering her sweetmeats. Now she had incontrovertible proof, yet she’d have left the castle before she could present it to the Castellan.

The chamber was sweltering already, its casements barred against dangerous miasmas borne on the night breeze. Nevertheless, something must be done about the intolerable drone of those snores. 

The bed-curtains were dusty affairs of heavy brocade in the style of thirty years back. Charis pulled them shut. The mattress was all lumps, the sheets tangled into ropes as her sweat soaked them. The fusty smell of the hangings poured over her palate, so she could not imagine smelling or tasting anything else, ever again. Sleep came hard and was broken when it came.

Time and again she woke from dreams of arriving at St Cecelia’s Well as dusk fell, finding it deserted, or of pounding though waist-deep grasses, never getting nearer, while the Abbey bell tolled the offices. 

In the worst dream of all she reached the well to find Sherlock on the threshold. He smiled, his face a skull in the moonlight. “Go in, he is waiting for you.” Dread rose like mist about her feet. She stumbled past her husband to see Lord Lestrade sprawled supine across the plinth, the blood from his slashed throat oozing out in great viscous clots to pollute the water below.

She woke, shaking, and plucked the curtains aside. The barest hint of grey leaked through the casement. She spared a glance at the pallet. The woman had turned onto her back and was snorting worse than before. No danger there. 

Yesterday Charis had purloined a jacket and breeches and hidden them beneath her mattress, gambling that their owner would assume them casualties of the Great Wash. She donned them, swept up her hair into a cap, and left down the servants’ stair, heading towards the stables at a purposeful trot.

The Creature whickered with pleasure at seeing her. She slid him one of the comfits which had not received the powdered opium treatment. He devoured it and nosed at the breast-pocket of her jacket for any traces of powdered sugar. 

It was getting lighter by the moment. Made clumsy by haste, she retrieved the saddle-bags from the feed-store in which she’d hidden them. The buckles were stiff and the leather under-oiled. She framed a rebuke to the head groom, before recalling that, as with the lady of the bedchamber, she would be gone before she could deliver it.

The Creature craned his neck and attempted to nip her waist. She dodged, and gave his muzzle a firm tap.

“Yes. I know. _Not_ a packhorse. Well, you know what, you stuck-up animal? Nor am I a groom. But if I’m prepared to put up with loading you, you can put up with carrying it.”

Whether it was the force of reason, or the Creature’s (perfectly accurate) suspicion that she had more of the comfits concealed about her person, he grudgingly allowed her to finish saddling him. 

They rode out before anyone stirred. A fresh, clean, northerly breeze blew, carrying the scent of home.

The moment they found a flat piece of turf she let the Creature have his head. He caught her mood, changed stride and broke into a gallop. On the far horizon was a dark smudge: the grove of cypresses through which the path to the holy well wound. Lord Lestrade would be waiting there. Once she entered the grove she would cease to be a girl riding. She would become a woman riding to a secret assignation. 

But until then –

She drummed her heels into the Creature’s flanks and shouted her exultation to the spring breeze.


	2. Chapter 2

At the well, the chapel garth had been transformed. Crisp white cloths were spread on the smooth turf, garlanded with fresh flowers, set with silver-gilt plates and goblets. The heady scent of spiced meat arose from braziers. As she approached, a lutenist concealed amid the trees struck up a fantasia upon Gondalian folksongs. 

Lord Lestrade rose to his feet and swept her the lowest possible bow. As he raised his head and took in her appearance the corners of his mouth tightened. His brows drew down.

“My darling girl, what a terrible journey you must have had!”

Charis crimsoned. She alone, her hair blown into elf-locks by her wild gallop, clad in an ill-fitting pair of breeches and coarse wool jacket, reeking of her own sweat and that of the horse, struck a discordant note in this bower planned for a Queen of Faery.

Lord Lestrade smiled. “Never mind, my sweet. There are fresh clothes for you in the chapel vestry. You won’t have to suffer the indignity of that errand-boy guise a moment longer.”

He stretched out his hand to take her bridle. “Allow me.”

The Creature curled back his lips, baring grass-stained teeth. He scratched at the dirt with his off-fore foot, and, after a pause for consideration, stretched back his hind legs and released a gushing waterfall of stale, pungent and steaming. Lord Lestrade jumped back just too late to dodge the splash, and stifled an oath.

“Oh, I’m sorry –” 

He pasted a smile on his face. “My dearest! I’m not one of your palace lords of Gaaldine, with no care but to keep my hands white for playing the clavichord and doing work better left to scriveners. Horses will be horses, as King Ambrosine – God rest his soul – used to say.”

The glance he cast at the Creature rather belied his forgiving words. Anyway, Papa’s full phrase (at least, when he supposed his daughter out of earshot) had been, _“Horses will be horses, and I’ve no use for men who think themselves too refined to know which end the shit comes out of.”_

Charis permitted Lord Lestrade to assist her down from the Creature and hand her into the care of two maids. A layered and elaborate riding habit of huntsman’s green trimmed with silver lace lay ready in the vestry.

The maids ministered to her competently, though something (doubtless the terror of attending on royalty) had rendered them almost dumb. Even when their duties required them to speak, their thick Borders accents made their Gondalian almost incomprehensible. Had less than two years away rendered home so alien?

That sense of disorientation grew once she joined Lord Lestrade on the chapel garth.

Save for her and the maids, the party consisted entirely of men. From a distance they might look like a carefree band of mayers, but the servitors presenting platters of sucking kid marinated in sheep-milk curds or chicken livers stuffed with almonds had hands scarred in the training ring, not the kitchen. The weapons that peeped from beneath their holiday garb were well-used and sharp. Those not serving food scanned the landscape in all directions, most especially in the direction of Cavron, the danger quadrant. Catching a few glances aimed at her, Charis thought they were calculating whether she was a cause worth dying for, and coming up short.

Despite her early start, the long ride behind her and the longer still in prospect, appetite failed. She took a last sip of wine – that, at least, took little effort to swallow – wiped her lips with her napkin and sat up straight.

Lord Lestrade selected a boned quail leg glazed in quince jelly from his own plate, and skewered it on a knife point. 

“Let me tempt you, milady.”

She waved it away. “No, thank you; I –”

He popped the morsel between her lips before she could complete the sentence. She spluttered, fighting an unladylike urge to spit. When she could speak again she allowed a note of reproach to enter her voice.

“Lord Lestrade, I had finished eating.”

He smiled; she thought, irrelevantly, that she had not noted before how white his teeth looked. Nor how sharp.

“There’s a hard ride ahead of us. I can’t have your strength failing. Your province, my dearest, is the boudoir and the dancing salon. Now you’re in mine. This is hostile country, and we may have to fight for you before we’re through. Now, make a proper meal, speedily, and we’ll be on our way.”

Their path began to climb as soon as they left St Cecilia’s Well, twisting through the trees until they emerged onto a narrow path which wound its way up the side of the mountain, a sheer drop at their left-hand side. Not a route down which armies might come, this precipitous goat’s track, but a scout’s route, a spy’s trail. Charis mentally reviewed Castle Cavron’s defences, and wished she could send a message to the Castellan. They needed to place an outpost here.

Scrub and gorse gave way to bare rock: tumbled boulders, lying one atop another like the wreckage of some giants’ game. The men-at-arms became tenser, their hands resting on sword hilts, heads snapping round at each small noise. Charis could hardly blame them. Half a hundred men could lie concealed amid these rocks, and one would never know until they arose, bent on battle and red ruin.

Lord Lestrade lifted the Creature’s reins over its head so he could lead horse and rider behind him, since the path did not permit two to ride abreast. Charis suffered the indignity in silence, though part of her reflected acidly it would have been a great deal safer – for _all_ of them – if she’d retained her breeches and the man’s saddle they made possible until they were across the mountains.

All that was forgotten when they reached the summit of the pass. The sun was sinking, gilding the slopes behind them with its slanted beams. The dales ahead, from which it had already passed, were pools of violet shadow. Above them a lanner – her own falcon, her heraldic badge – soared on the still air, uttering a high-pitched “kri, kri” as she hunted.

They reined in their horses. 

“My dearest love.” Lord Lestrade turned to her, his melting brown eyes shining with emotion. “Permit me to welcome you home, to your own land.”

His horse sidled close to hers, so that his thigh pressed against her legs. Their lips found each other in a lingering kiss.

It was full dark by the time they reached the overnight stop, a fortified farmhouse, an outlier of the Lestrade estates, the tenants cleared away for the event, his troop of soldiers taking the place of herdsmen and dairy-maids. Another intimate little supper was laid ready in the best parlour, on wood scrubbed and polished to within an inch of its life.

Half-way through the meal appetite deserted her again. She fiddled a little with a bread roll to disguise her inactivity with platter and knife, looked up and caught Lord Lestrade’s eye. For a second she expected him to force food between her lips, as he had at the well. Instead, he pushed his chair a foot or so back from the table and subjected her to a slow, leisurely scrutiny. Hot blood rose to her cheeks.

The lines around his mouth relaxed into a half-smile, conveying not so much humour as satisfaction. He resembled nothing so much as a physician, noting the patient’s crisis had occurred precisely when and how the texts predicted. She shivered.

Without a word he crooked his smallest finger. The maids must have been standing ready. In an instant they were at her side.

“Her grace is wearied and wishes to retire,” Lord Lestrade announced. 

She was at the door when his pointed cough caused her to turn. He lifted his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss in her direction. 

“Later, my love,” he mouthed. She cast a horrified glance at the maids, who maintained a blank silence. Too bemused to do anything else, too conscious of the weapons bulging beneath the jackets of the servitors, she suffered herself to be led upstairs. 

She thought, furiously, every step of the way.


	3. Chapter 3

“I don’t understand.” The combination of Lord Lestrade’s long, athletic legs, cloaked in fine dark hair and his short white night-shirt gave him an absurd, heron-like appearance. Notwithstanding the seriousness of the moment Charis found herself hard-pressed to stifle a giggle.

She took a deep breath, brought the sheet up beneath her chin for modesty, and sat up. 

“It’s as I said. My marriage to Sher – to the Crown Prince has not been consummated. If we only have a little patience, I may have it annulled and we can be properly and honourably married, in the sight of God and the whole world.”

The silence that followed went on a little too long. She craned her neck so she could see Lord Lestrade properly. He was standing by the marble-topped wash-stand, gripping its edge so tightly his fingers had turned white. 

Something shifted in her guts. This was not how she had expected her announcement to be received.

“My love? Is there something wrong? I thought you’d be pleased –”

Lord Lestrade hiccupped – at least, that was what it sounded like. 

“My darling girl, of course I am. But – that is – have you thought what it would mean for you? Don’t you remember the Carfax annulment case, in ’83?”

In ’83 she had just arrived with the nuns, terrified by being so far from home, elated that her father had at last given in to her pleas to follow Agnes and Beatrice to school, despite Papa’s qualms that it put her too much on a level with those whom Divine Providence had placed her above. No breath of Court scandal had been allowed to penetrate that remote Northern fastness. Mother Superior would not have permitted it.

Charis shook her head.

“Well, dear heart, from the moment the case began _everyone_ was talking about the Carfaxes, in the most prurient detail possible. It went on for months. He, of course, was the main target, but Lady Frances didn’t escape. I heard one old dowager confide to a dozen or so of her dearest cronies that she’d had it in confidence from her own maid that the reason Lady Frances couldn’t keep an attendant wasn’t just her shrewish temper, but her personal grossness; that her maids had to hold their breath to stand to be in her presence long enough to dress her, so no wonder any man, however lusty, found intimacy with her an insupportable prospect. And a great deal more in the same vein. Look; I know the generous spirit which moves you to make the offer, but you have no idea of the cost it would entail.”

Despite herself, Charis flinched. She had heard dowagers of the courts of Gondal and of Gaaldine dissect characters faster and more ruthlessly than Sherlock analysed corpses. Still, she had not come this point to fall at the first real challenge.

“I know it will be hard, but it will have to be done. Otherwise, how can we marry?”

Again, a pause held just a second too long. 

“My dear – this is wholly unexpected –”

Awkward, jangling, uneven: an inexperienced equestrian making a hash of the transition between gaits. In a blinding flash of clarity she understood. He had not dreaded Sherlock tracking them down and pressing the issue to a duel, as she had. He had yearned for it. That moment in the withdrawing room, when he had all-but challenged Colonel Ross over a misunderstood word, came back to her with increased force.

Memory jerked her further back. She was sitting on a sunlit slope below the old castle in Gaaldine town, gossiping to a girl she had not known then was Frances.

_“He was exiled to his country estates before his twentieth birthday. Not even Marguerite told me the details, so it must have been the most tremendous scandal.”_

Another memory: John, in blood-stained jacket and breeches, striding along a palace corridor, talking in a fast, angry undertone to the assistant chirugeon who, despite John’s limp, was having a hard time keeping up. _“Three lives ruined. If he survives, what life can he have, missing half his jaw? His wife brought to labour seven weeks early with the shock; the baby no bigger than a half-drowned cat, and less apt to live. And no more than a slap on the wrist for that young hothead! They should hang men for it, as they do in Gaaldine.”_

Her stomach dropped, as for the first time she made the connection. Her hands started to shake; she flipped a fold of sheet over them lest Lord Lestrade see. 

“My Lord, do you not see this as your chance to take your name – your House – through to the glory it deserves?”

She could see that thought blaze in his eyes and then, like a taper put to too-green wood, sputter and die away. The tip of his tongue flicked out to moisten his full red lips.

“Ssh, my girl. Even here – even within my own manor – such words are treason.”

“But surely – ”

“No more, I beg you.” He was backing towards the door. “We will talk on this further, but not here. Not tonight.”

He was gone. 

Her pillow was soaked with tears before sleep’s mercy at last took her.

* * *

The next day’s ride was an uneasy business, though the bogle-haunted uplands were soon left behind. They rode through a wide, rolling landscape, lush with orchards and trailing wild roses. The peasants they saw tipped their hats or bobbed curtseys. Some of the bolder shouted greetings. It was plain they were welcoming their own lord back to his native land.

By contrast, Charis, riding beside him, seemed almost invisible. None of the women acknowledged her directly. One old grannie, indeed, turned pointedly aside and spat in the dust. As for the men – there was something a little too appraising, a little too forthright about how they looked at her. She made a mental note that when they reached their destination she would take a long hard look at the riding habit. Perhaps it needed to be restyled, to give her more dignity or err a trifle more on the side of modesty. 

Lord Lestrade exerted himself to amuse, but more and more frequently as the day wore on, fell into odd silences. By the time they rounded the final bend in the road, they had not exchanged a word for at least a turn of the glass. Perhaps he, too, was longing for an end to this ride, looking forward to washing off the dust of the road and to a long, cool, refreshing drink before dinner.

She had not seen Castle Lestrade for almost ten years, and would not have recognised it from those fragmented childhood memories. The main dwelling part had been rebuilt after the modern, German style. The mansion soared above the crumbling stone of the old curtain walls, faced with brick, its rows of great glass windows blazing fire in the evening sun. 

Charis had spent far too long checking and re-checking accounts for the renovations to Cavron against estimates. (Mycroft would pay them, of course, but one didn’t want to look like a gullible fool to the King.) Lestrade family lands were good, but successive generations were reputed to have lived up to their rent-rolls and beyond. Rebuilding on that reckless scale (all that glass! and in the Borders, too!): where on earth had the money come from? 

Her stomach gave another lurch. How much did it cost to obtain an annulment of marriage? She had assumed, blithely, that Lord Lestrade would fund the lawyers and bribe any churchmen who might stand between them and their objective. After all, once she was free to marry him, she would join her own dower lands to his. The long game surely justified any outlay at the start.

Looking up at the gold-red glare of those windows, she saw another reason for Lord Lestrade’s reluctance. Not fear of the Pretender’s wrath, but sheer, sordid financial calculation. She tasted bile at the back of her throat. What kind of man saw a duel to the death in terms of thalers and cents saved?

Beside her, Lestrade gave a shout of sheer anger. Her head jerked up in surprise, but he was off, plunging recklessly down the narrow path, scattering pedestrians to left and right. Taken unawares, she failed to prevent the Creature following in his wake. The next few moments were a breathless, frantic scramble to keep her seat and bring her horse under control. She had barely managed it when she arrived at the incident which had provoked Lestrade’s anger.

A baggage wagon had shed a wheel in the archway which led through the perimeter wall into the castle courtyard and over-turned. Its unlucky driver had, by some freak, managed to choose that very moment in early evening when the workers flooding in from duties about the estate met the out-flux of castle servants to lodgings or taverns in the village. The clamour, the swearing, the snorting and stamping of horses was indescribable.

A few yards upslope from the chaos, a Moorish woman was sitting on a white mule, observing the chaos as if it were a show put on for her especial benefit. Lord Lestrade stood at the mule’s head, remonstrating with its rider: from his gestures, remonstrating very angrily indeed, if to little apparent effect. After a moment or so he gave up and signalled a servitor to lead mule and rider through a small postern into the castle courtyard, vanishing through the door after them without a backwards glance.

Charis spurred forward to the postern. For a moment she thought one of the officious men at arms was about to bar her passage, but she gave him her best Royal glare. He fell back the half-pace it needed for her to squeeze through.

Inside the castle courtyard Lord Lestrade and the Moorish woman, both now dismounted, were glaring at each other in a way that made clear Charis had walked in on a most tremendous row.

She slid to the ground herself. The man-at-arms had followed her in and was standing behind her, looking, she thought, uncommonly foolish. She handed him the Creature’s reins.

“Pray see my mount is watered and stabled. I shall be along to see him later.”

Lord Lestrade half-turned at the sound of her voice, his mouth agape as if startled to find her there.

“Will you not introduce your guest to me?” Charis enquired.

“Guest! That’s a nice one!” The Moorish girl – she was younger than Charis had at first thought – had three fingers’ breadth of height on her, which Charis was minded to consider unfair. Further, the grace and pride of her carriage as she paced the courtyard could only be called _magnificent_.

Lord Lestrade gulped. The other woman turned in a swirl of skirts, and glared at him. 

“Yes, _darling_ , why don’t you introduce me to your new little friend?” 

“Sally, hold your tongue!”

That heedless use of the woman’s Christian name (assuming she _was_ a Christian) made all certain. A man might address his sister so, but the woman was patently not his sister. Which only left – Charis felt she had taken a blow to her solar plexus. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying out, and tasted blood.

The significance of the baggage wagon now became clear. Lord Lestrade must have packed this Sally off on some trip – he most assuredly had not expected to find her here – only for her to return unexpectedly early, no doubt having got wind of his doings at the Pentecost fair. If it had not been for the wagon being overset, they would have come upon her ensconced in state, acting the chatelaine of Castle Lestrade.

Belatedly, Charis recalled her dignity. She inclined her head with the subtle gradation of courtesy which befitted a younger woman of rank greeting an older dependent, whose age and infirmities demanded respect. She had no hope this _foreigner_ would take the point, but Lord Lestrade was a noble of Gondal, of the very first rank. She was gratified to see him go plum-dark. His words caught in his throat.

“My lady and – um – my lady. The hour advances and – well. I shall put back dinner.” 

His whole countenance had somehow turned wobbly, as if the bones had softened within, as in Phyllis’ famous Whole Steamed Cockerel in Aromatics, Complete With Comb.

Charis and Sally spoke at the same moment.

“Pray have someone bring a tub of hot water to my room.”

“I need to sluice the dust off. Make sure they see to it.”

Lord Lestrade backed away, bowing.

“Indeed, my lady. Miladies.”


	4. Chapter 4

Dinner was not a restful meal. By the time merciful dessert arrived Charis was on the point of screaming. 

Sally Donovan (that was the interloper’s name, Charis’s tiring maid told her, along with other details, namely that she had arrived with Lord Lestrade following a trip by him to the Kingdom of Naples last November and been in residence ever since) seemed to have acquired a new vivacity while dressing. She had, of course, home advantage, including an outfit which had _not_ spent two days crammed into saddlebags. 

Throughout the endless procession of over-spiced, over-rich, not overly warm dishes offered for their consideration, she kept up a witty, unsparing commentary: on her travels, on the latest fashions in Gondal, and how far they lagged behind those of Naples, even though she had not seen her home for almost eight months, and no doubt style would have advanced even further in her absence…

Charis tried, unsuccessfully, not to feel provincial.

No wonder Mycroft always looked to King Louis’ court at Versailles as a pattern of impossible perfection. No wonder that appalling, stuck-up English girl who’d got herself murdered last year had sneered at her behind her fan. If even the merchants’ daughters of Naples appeared so sophisticated, what must the aristocrats be like? 

Sally leant across Lestrade. “Will you take a turn with me on the roof garden, your grace? The men become _very_ stupid at this hour, and it is an age since we have had a lady guest. Do me the honour of walking with me.”

 _Roof terrace,_ In an instant, Charis saw the edge, felt the quick sharp push in the small of her back. Such an obvious trap. She opened her mouth to refuse, but something forestalled her. 

_In hostile territory, the biggest danger is inadequate intelligence._

She rose to her feet. “I look forward to tasting the fresh air.” She extended her arm. “Come. Walk with me.”

They had barely reached the roof-walk (protected, Charis noted, by a substantial parapet) when Sally, disregarding protocol, said, “Did he do the rose thing on you, too?”

“What –?”

Sally jabbed downwards with her right hand, forefinger outstretched. “Rose. On your pillow. Plus, I expect, a note promising his eternal devotion, but a bit woolly when it came to specifics.”

It might have been the overly-rich banquet, or the Canary wine, which she had tossed back at dinner with a freedom born of nerves, but Charis tasted acid vomit at the back of her throat.

Even though the half-moon was yet to rise, Sally appeared to read her face without difficulty. 

“You and me both, then. To say nothing of the others.”

“ _Others_?” It came out as a squeak.

“Well, I expect you’ve heard his nickname? Must have, mustn’t you, being as you’re here?”

 _That_ observation touched on areas she had no intention of sharing. Still, no point in pretending ignorance. “The Widow-maker?” 

Sally’s nod was an angry jerk of the chin. “Widow- _maker_. Not widow- _keeper_ , you’ll notice. No weeping ladies in black veils hanging round the place. Trust me, once I discovered what I’d let myself in for, I checked. Every room. Twice.”

They reached the end of the walk. Before turning to promenade back in the other direction Charis paused, looking over the parapet. Fifty feet down to the courtyard, the first line of casements ten feet below the parapet, the servitor who had followed them up to the roof hovering at the far end of the walk, too intimidated to approach further. This was as near privacy as she could expect.

“Might I enquire, Mistress Donovan, why you continue here, given it would appear your stay has not promised what you hoped?”

Sally caught her by both shoulders – mindful of the drop, Charis stifled her shriek of outrage, just – and swung her round so she could stare her straight in the eye. Charis kept her head up and stared back. After a second Sally released her and took a step back, raising her palms as if in surrender. 

“You’re not what I expected, you.” She gave a short, harsh laugh. “Mind you, I’m not sure what I did expect. Haven’t had any experience of princesses. And I can’t say my experience of aristocrats in general has been extensive. _Intensive_ , maybe.”

She cast a dirty look in the direction of the stairs. The sounds of ragged, drunken singing were making themselves heard from the dining chamber below.

“So, why _do_ you stay?” Charis had meant to sound stiff and dignified, but instead it came out genuinely curious. Sally’s entire outline relaxed.

“What choice do I have? You can’t imagine I’d be any too welcome back home, if I crawl back without a ring, do you? My family are merchants; they’ve got a short way with damaged stock. Get rid of it as fast as they can, for whatever it’ll fetch. No questions asked or answered.”

Revelation struck like vertigo. Charis stumbled back from the parapet, and sank onto a stone bench. “If I go back, the King will have me killed.”

Sally sat down beside her and, again without asking permission, stretched out and took her hands in both her own. Charis made no protest. Even the semblance of comfort in this alien place came as a relief.

“You sure about that? From what I heard, your husband’s an outlaw. Why would his brother care?”

“I – ” Charis baulked at any attempt to explain the relationship between the King and her husband to Sally. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated.”

Sally spread her skirts on the bench. “You don’t have to be royal to have a complicated family, trust me. Let me tell you about my uncles. Fell out at Grandma’s funeral. After that, Uncle Alberto only had to hear Uncle Rodrigo was in the market for something and he’d move heaven and earth to get it instead, no matter what it cost. And vice versa, of course. Looked like they’d wipe each other out before they were done.”

Sally chopped down with the edge of her hand. 

“So, when it’d been going on a year or two, there’s this antiquities dealer who has to sell up in a hurry. Uncle Rodrigo puts in the low-ball bid, gets the ball rolling. Prompt as clockwork, next day Uncle Alberto doubles it. Everyone else stays the hell out. Been burnt before, see? Only this time – this time – Uncle Rodrigo doesn’t come back with a better offer. And, since the dealer’s creditors are banging on the doors by this point, he has to accept whatever Uncle Alberto is offering,”

“And?” 

Sally grinned. “Oh, this bit is good. It turned out that among the old junk in the dealer’s stockroom there was a set of intaglios which’d been done as a companion piece for a set of cameos on the same theme – light and dark, see? And the guy who owned the cameos was pretty much prepared to offer whatever anyone wanted for the intaglios, so he could have the complete set.”

“And could he afford them?”

The grin got deeper, showing Sally’s teeth very white and even. “Oh yes. Being as he was only His Holiness the Bleeding Pope.”

Reflexively, Charis gasped and crossed herself. Sally leant forward.

“But that’s my family all over. We’re not the sort to let personal feelings stand in the way of the main chance. Something you might want to bear in mind, in your situation.”

A message, of course, and not what it seemed on its face. Still, the day had been too long, the fact of betrayal too overwhelming, her sense of isolation too intense for her to interpret it.

As she had been taught since her earliest years, she took refuge in the fortress of her rank.

“What a fascinating story. You do seem to have a most _interesting_ family. But for now, I’m afraid the fatigues of the day have been all too much for me. Please call my maid, so I may retire.”

She rose from the bench and, without looking back, paced towards the stair down. Behind her, she heard Sally Donovan breathe out, “bitch!”

Amid the overpowering scent of the potted roses, Charis caught the whiff of burnt bridges.


	5. Chapter 5

She woke with dawn, stirring restlessly in the unfamiliar bed. At the first sound of her bare feet on the bedroom floor the door opened and a maid came in: a new woman, not one she had seen before. She was tall, raw-boned, with an air of coarse strength and those blank, unsmiling Borders features behind which any thoughts, or none, might be stirring.

Something about the woman – her silence, her promptness (had she slept on the threshold? And, if so, did that made her guard or gaoler?) put Charis even more on edge. 

“Bring me a morning gown. Something serviceable, rather than fine. I have to go down to the stables, to see how my horse has spent the night.”

Impossibly, the maid hesitated, almost as if she might query the instruction. Then she nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Charis forced a light smile. “Pray, tell me your name.”

“Jean, ma’am.”

“A good Borders name. Look, Jean, it is of small consequence, especially as between ourselves, but the correct etiquette is to address me as ‘your grace’ first, and only use ‘ma’am’ later. Then, use ‘her grace’ if you should have to refer to me to others.”

“Ma’am.” Jean flushed an unbecoming red. “Forgive me, ma’am; I intended no discourtesy, but…”

Her voice tailed off. It occurred to Charis that here might be a moment to unbend a little. Only a fool put herself at odds with her tiring maid.

“Pray, feel at liberty to speak freely.” She hesitated, and then added, “Honesty, without insolence, can never be blameworthy, you know.”

Jean’s expression suggested she put as much credence in this assertion as, when she came to think about it, Charis did herself. Nevertheless, after a moment or so, Jean cast her eyes down to the floor and began.

“I’d not want you to think me discourteous or lacking a sense of what’s proper, ma’am, but my Da fell fighting Gaaldine, in the last war, and they were saying you married their Crown Prince. Who’s to say, ma’am, maybe your husband even led those –”

Belatedly, she swallowed a word which Charis, primed by the last weeks in the Castellan’s company, had no difficulty in supplying for herself. 

“He did not.” The assurance came out before she could stop it. 

Jean looked up, tear-tracks silvering her cheeks like snails’ trails. “How do you know, ma’am? You’d have been a babe in the nursery, back then.”

Charis hesitated. Mycroft’s “surrender or be banished” ultimatum had been read from every pulpit in Gaaldine. The news the brothers had not always seen eye to eye was hardly intelligence worth anyone’s purchase.

“I understand that Sher- – that the Crown Prince was away from the kingdom at the time. That it occurred at all was a matter of some reproach. Had he been in Gaaldine –”

No. That would not do. Sherlock had set her to study the conflict, telling her it could stand as an ideal pattern of hubris and futility in military affairs. Aspiring officers, he asserted, could always learn more from disasters than triumphs. But one could not tell an orphaned daughter that her father and thousands of others had died because of bungled, self-serving intelligence reports; a fractious Council, dominated by a war party in need of a bone; a hasty, ambiguously worded despatch to the frontier, strategically misinterpreted by an ambitious general, promoted beyond his talents.

She cast her eyes up at the sun-dappled plaster of the room’s ceiling, hoping for inspiration. She found it where she had always found it, in John.

“My personal physician – my oldest and dearest friend – suffered a grievous wound in Gondal’s service in that campaign. He may have known your father. Tell me, what is your family name?”

“Murray, ma’am. My father was Jack Murray of Ridgehouses.”

“Well, Jean, I shall ask John, when next we speak, if he recalls anything of him.” 

Even as she spoke sick dread twisted inside her. _When next we speak_. When _would_ she meet John again? More to the point, what would he have to say to her when they did?

It had not occurred to her to think – she corrected herself, she had not _allowed_ herself to think – how John would react to her actions. His loyalty had been so assured, such a constant factor in her life, that she could barely conceive of an existence in which she had tested it to the breaking point.

 _Or beyond_ a voice said at the back of her mind. The voice spoke on, tone and words familiar: spoken once and never forgotten. _“They sent me to Gondal as a hostage in my grandfather’s time. Without John, I’d have died of sheer misery.”_

Jean, uncomprehending but sympathetic, looked at her.

“Should I fetch you your chocolate here, ma’am, in your room, before I dress you?”

She nodded, dumbly, unable to trust her voice. On the threshold, Jean turned.

“Ma’am, if you’ll forgive me – and heaven knows, a lady doesn’t get much say in such things – but it must have come hard to you, too, then, being given in marriage to Gaaldine.”

Charis chose her next words with extreme care. “It was my father, King Ambrosine’s, dearest wish that my marriage would help unite the kingdoms, so that fewer women would be left to mourn fathers, husbands and sons lost to the wars between the kingdoms.”

“Ah! Well, that goes to show, doesn’t it, ma’am?”

“Show?”

Jean paused. Then, “That even kings don’t always get what they want. The men were saying, last night, there’ll be war with Gaaldine this summer for certain, now. I should be getting your chocolate, ma’am.”

After she had gone Charis stared at the closed door of the room, murmuring to herself, over and over, “Holy Virgin. What have I done?”


	6. Chapter 6

Unlike the formal apartments, the stables breathed peace, order and home. The clank of buckets, rhythmic swish of brooms and the overall air of honest, well-organised labour smoothed out the turmoil in her heart. 

Even here, though, she felt herself an interloper. The stable-lads continued their tasks while watching her out of the corners of their eyes. The Creature’s affectionate greeting – he, at least, didn’t seem to cherish any resentment – caused a stir of muttering. Doubtless he had been up to his old tricks again.

One young man, from his bearing and the quality of his clothing the senior lad, led in a horse from early morning exercise. Charis recognised the black stallion with which Lord Lestrade had triumphed at the Cock o’ the North fair. She gave a little, two-fingered wave to attract the lad’s attention.

“A fine beast, that. He did your whole stable credit in the race in Gaaldine, at Pentecost.” She recalled that she had not, officially, seen the stallion perform and added, “Everyone was talking about it, after.”

The lad’s noncommittal expression changed instantly. “Aye, ma’am, he’s a good one and will be better yet, if the saints preserve us. Not five years old yet, he’s not. A gift of the King himself, ma’am, out of the Royal stables.”

Charis gasped. Odd how memory could do that to you: lie hidden for years and then spring out, clear as ever and sharp enough to cut. Three years ago, before Papa had fallen ill – or, no – had he not looked uncharacteristically tired at supper that very evening? Three years ago, anyway, the two of them standing against the rails of the parade ring at the summer palace, watching the one- and two-year colts being paraded so choices might be made: geld or keep entire; dispose of or retain.

She recalled the black colt, bolder and more assertive than the rest, giving his handlers trouble as he entered the ring, but switching to his most polished gait as soon as he saw the Kingly eye upon him. How Papa had laughed!

“A horse with a sense of occasion. Yes; we shall certainly keep _him_.” His eye dropped down to Charis. “When that horse reaches his prime, you should be about ripe to be wed. If he develops as he promises, he might do well as a bride-gift for your husband, hey?”

And now Papa was dead, she was a wife and yet no wife, and the man for whose sake she was gambling two kingdoms had received the horse already, from the hands of the Pretender.

After a moment she managed to say, “I recall him as a colt. He showed great promise then. The King my father remarked on it.”

The lad unbent yet further. “Ah, ma’am, and his late grace the King had the best eye for a horse in all Gondal, they said.” He nodded towards the Creature. “I doubt you had that beast off of him, ma’am.”

“Indeed not.” She let a trickle of amused reproof enter her voice. “Though, in the Border lands, maybe it is as well to ride a horse which does not proclaim its quality to any casual eye. And one which is likely to prove _remarkably_ hard for any stranger to handle, still less extract from its stable without injury.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The lad’s tone somehow managed to convey both “I _do_ see” and “I was coming to that”.

Charis decided to pre-empt the latter. “I was going to say – what is your name, by the way?”

“Sam, ma’am.”

“Well, Sam, once you have finished your current duties, perhaps I could put you in the way of knowing a few of his small peculiarities, and so ease your task of handling him?”

Sam nodded. “I’d be right grateful, ma’am.” He whistled. A fascinated gaggle of junior lads had been watching the exchange. Two of them ran up and led the black stallion away. “No time like the present – that is, if it suits your convenience, ma’am.”

Charis patted the Creature’s neck. He extended his neck, twitched his withers and looked, to her experienced eye, rather pleased to be the undivided centre of attention once more.

“My horse is not an animal who likes being confined. If he could be turned out, then I think you may find his care will be a great deal easier.” 

“That can be done directly, ma’am. May I?”

He reached for the Creature’s head-collar. Charis quaked inwardly but the Creature merely nuzzled his jerkin. 

“Lead on,” Charis said, gesturing towards the door of the stables. Sam clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The Creature moved out of the stall. Charis, mindful that this show of co-operation might be a deception, dodged round his flank so she might be at his head if anything went wrong. 

“Stop!” The shout came from the doorway. “What the devil do you think you are doing with that beast?”

“Sir – I – we weren’t meaning –” Sam’s words tailed off as the master of the castle horse strode into the stables. Charis looked from one to the other. The lad was tight-lipped, his shoulders hunched as if to ward off a blow. The master of the horse looked – as if only Charis’s presence was restraining him from delivering that blow.

She cleared her throat, trying to convey the kind of wordless rebuke Mycroft managed so effectively. Either the King possessed some knack Charis didn’t, or the master of the horse was made of sterner stuff than the courtiers of Gaaldine. His lip curled with contempt and his choleric features went an even deeper shade of purple.

She fell back on words, biting them off short to show her displeasure.

“Your groom was acting on my express request. There are some points with respect to the care of my horse, which –”

“I give the orders in these stables,” the horse master said, cutting her short with a brutality that felt like a punch to the gut. “And I take them only from his Lordship. Ma’am.” He spat out the customary courtesy as if it were gall on his tongue.

Charis drew herself up, and wished she were taller. Or a man. Or both.

“I cannot imagine Lord Lestrade could have intended –”

“His Lordship told me,” the horse master interrupted, “that you’re not to ride out without him or me being there to escort you, and, also, he’s not having a four-legged joke like that beast casting shame on his company, not in his own lands and before his own people. I’m to look you out a suitable palfrey. No doubt we’ll find some use for – that – out on the estates. It looks sturdy enough, at all events, and once it learns who’s master here, no doubt we can put it to use dragging hurdles up to the high pastures or the like.”

Red mist rose up in front of Charis’s eyes. She wanted to throw something, to call guards to have him dragged off and flogged, to –

Sam’s terrified expression was a jug of cold water in her face. She was _not_ mistress here; at least, not yet, and she could neither order floggings nor protect others from them. Nor would displays of temper in front of underlings aid her cause. This outrage needed to be tackled properly, at its source.

She inclined her head with icy dignity.

“I need to find Lord Lestrade at once. Kindly have – Sam, is it not? – take me to him.”

* * *

They found Lord Lestrade pacing the North Terrace, before the grand façade of the new mansion, a most discomfited expression on his face. 

“Lord Lestrade!” 

He beckoned her towards him. As she stepped forward she heard something scrunch underfoot. She looked down to see the shattered china figurine of a musician lying on the flagged floor. 

She raised her head to meet Lord Lestrade’s eyes but he flushed and turned his head away. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a servant sweeping up a remarkable quantity of porcelain shards.

She glanced upwards. A swirl of fabric behind one of the open upper casements betrayed some observer’s retreat from the window into the room behind. Charis took note of the casement’s position. Knowing the position of Mistress Donovan’s suite might come in handy. One never knew.

She pasted a smile upon her face. “What a beautiful morning it is, Lord Lestrade.”

Tension leached from his frame. “Indeed it is, lady of my heart. And how are you? I trust you found all to your liking?”

She paused, as if trying to frame a judicious answer. 

“I could not have had more comfortable lodging. And your people have been most attentive. But I am afraid there seems to have been some little misunderstanding, with respect to my horse.”

“Your horse?” Lord Lestrade’s tone was all concern but she saw his shoulders stiffen. 

_He anticipates an outburst. The master of the horse spoke true._

She cast her eyes down again, lest fury betray her. Another broken china figurine, a sage draped in exquisitely modelled pale green cloth, lay at her feet. Its eyes were filled with ageless wisdom, but offered no suggestions.

She picked her words with care. “Your head of the stables suggested that the horse I brought from Cavron would not to be my mount when we rode out. He told me your orders were to put him to haulage work. Surely, your man must be misinformed?”

He bit at his lip. “My lady, you are the rarest jewel of all the world. I would keep you throned in beauty; cut out all ugliness, age, deformity, dirt or disease that seeks to mar your perfect setting. Is that so unforgivable a fault?”

She thought of the master of the horse barring their exit from the stables, of Jean sleeping across the threshold of her room. Lord Lestrade’s perfect setting for his jewel seemed remarkably like a canary-bird’s golden cage. And if she had chosen her own lot, the Creature had not, and deserved not to suffer for her folly.

Charis put her head on one side, after the manner of Lady Caterina Fleming, the most annoyingly winsome of her fellow pupils at the convent. 

“He may be an ugly beast, but he is _very_ loyal. And the companion of my escape, the means by which I came to you. Please, can you let him be turned out in a paddock somewhere, where I may visit him sometimes, and perhaps we may think of suitable light duties for him by and by?”

Lord Lestrade laughed. “Oh, Charis, are you never going to grow up? You and your sentiment for useless beasts! Remember that smelly, half-blind coursing hound you dragged everywhere with you at court, when you were little?”

 _His name was Suleiman,_ she protested inwardly. _He was Mama’s._

The last time Papa had left his rooms had been the day they buried Suleiman beneath the almond tree. John had had to steady him every step of the way. Holding the shrouded bulk of the old dog in her arms, she had fought to hold back weeping, before she noticed the tears of King and physician alike falling like rain.

 _Caterina Fleming_. “Please,” she begged, making her eyes wide and pleading. “For my sake.”

He nodded, an indulgent smile on his face, like one who grants a favour to an importunate child. 

“Ah, well, the estate’s not so pressed for horses that we can’t afford to let that one have a few days idleness.” He turned to Sam. “See to it, you.”

“Sir.” Sam bowed and withdrew. 

Lord Lestrade extended his arm. “Will you take a turn with me along the terrace?”

Charis, heroically, resisted looking up at the mansion windows. No missiles descended. 

They were half-way along the terrace, safely out of earshot of any of the attendant servitors, when he broached the subject she had been half-wanting, half-dreading.

“My lady – that topic of which we spoke earlier –?”

“Yes?” She tried to still the trembling inside her. 

“There is much to be resolved. I have written for an canon law opinion on annulment. When that is received, I will be able to shape our plans better. In the meantime, my lady, you need to remain here, in quietness and – to the extent we are able to achieve it – incognito. That is –”

She saw his Adam’s apple bob convulsively as he swallowed. 

“It will be far easier – far _safer_ – if anyone who becomes aware of your presence here believes you to be simply a gentlewoman of Gaaldine, from the Northern Marches.”

Sheer fury took her by the throat. She could barely choke the next words out.

“And what about your own people, your servants and soldiers? They are hardly unaware of who I am and how I came here.” 

_Or with what fair show you brought me home._

Revelation hit her and she almost gagged. 

The picnic on the chapel-garth, that idiotic green-and-silver riding dress, the leisurely promenade through his ancestral lands: they had all been planned, and not as a wedding journey, either. What libertine would not dream of having a king’s daughter and a prince’s wife make a common wanton of herself, and all for love of him?

Lord Lestrade, fortunately, was looking anywhere but at her face. His voice, too, was that of a man distracted.

“I have given orders to the staff. They know both the rewards of discretion and the perils of wagging tongues. They will not betray you.”

_No. I know who has saved them the trouble of that task._

“But what of those within the walls who are _not_ your staff?” With an effort, Charis checked her impulse to look up at Sally Donovan’s windows.

Lord Lestrade’s glance up at the mansion’s casements was less well-disguised. “I shall see to that. There’s no reason for you to concern yourself.”

“Look! Sir, look there! The falcon!”

The cry from the arms-men at the end of the terrace caused them both to spin round. Glad of the distraction – any distraction – Charis ran to the parapet. 

Two black shapes arrowed towards them out of the sun, pursuer and pursued less than three thumbs’ lengths apart. The pigeon jinked and swerved; the falcon struck too soon – a single feather swirled gently down – and its reprieved prey soared.

“No! Don’t!” Charis shouted aloud, as she might have done at a creave-ball game.

Had the pigeon dived, it could have found safe haven in the time-worn hollows, the scars of long-forgotten wars, which pocked the older, lower masonry. The new mansion was a sheer cliff of glass and brick, not a needle’s breadth between any of them. No sanctuary here. 

The pigeon fluttered, hopeless. The falcon’s taloned feet brought it down on the flagged stone of the terrace in a bloody, twitching mess of feathers and shattered bones. 

Lord Lestrade’s arms-man was already running forwards. The falcon raised her head, gave an affronted “cr-rk!” and rose, flapping off lazily over the parapet. 

The arms-man bent, and picked up the pigeon’s corpse, turning to face them as he did so. Some unspoken message passed between the two men.

Lord Lestrade’s face looked grey and somehow doughy, like that of a man in the grip of some night terror, uncertain whether he sleeps or wakes. 

“Get rid of it.” His voice was a dry, unmusical croak. He turned to Charis. 

“Dear my lady, the morning wears on and you have yet to break your fast. I have some small matters of business to attend to, but will hope to join you presently.”

There was no other way to take it but as a dismissal. She choked back the comment she had proposed to make, with respect to an odd detail she had noted about the falcon as it dived. Either Lord Lestrade or his armsman must also have noted that the falcon’s legs wore the jesses of a manned bird. If they had not, doubtless Lord Lestrade would be as unwilling to hear her on falconry as he had already shown himself on horsemanship.

She made a grave, formal curtsey, and retreated to her apartments.


	7. Chapter 7

The next days, as Charis awaited the churchman’s answer, were a foretaste of Purgatory.

The palfrey the master of the horse found for her might as well have been a sofa. Its gait was significantly more lethargic than any horse’s had a right to be. Charis half-wondered if the master of the horse was feeding it poppy seeds.

The routine of their rides never varied. The cavalcade would form up, comprising the master of the horse, Charis herself, two grooms, two arms-men and an elderly gentlewoman, some distant connection of Lestrade’s mother, living out the last of her blameless days in a small house in the grounds. 

Once set in motion, they plodded a tortuous circuit along overgrown tracks heavy and buzzing with biting flies. At the first sign of restiveness on Charis’s part the master of the horse would bring the entire cavalcade to a halt and, in a voice dripping false concern, announce, “My lord’s orders are that my lady must not over-tire herself. We will return to the castle forthwith.” All attempts at remonstrance were met with the same smiling blandness, the same invocation of “My lord’s orders.”

Nor did she fare much better when not on horseback. Lord Lestrade’s decision that she was to be represented to the outside world as a gentlewoman of northern Gaaldine meant all her meals were taken in her room, not in the castle dining hall, lest some visitor to the castle notice her and draw conclusions.

What added gall to the cup was that her absence left Sally presiding as lady of the feast. From what Jean had told her of Lord Lestrade’s dining companions – cadets of money-strapped noble houses, out to win fortune by the sword, and grizzled mercenary captains, probably own brother or cousin to the bandits they hunted – Charis hardly envied her the honour. The noise rising from below of an evening made the Royal menagerie at feeding time sound like a haven of tranquility. Nevertheless, it was the principle of the thing. Jean tried to apply balm to the smart by telling her that however united the _public_ face Lestrade and Sally tried to display, she still kept the doors to her suite barred against any more private _rapprochement_. It was limited comfort.

During the endless hours of over-watched solitude Charis took refuge in drawing. At first it was merely to relieve boredom, but soon she conceived a bolder purpose. Lord Lestrade, she realised, still saw her as the child whom he had first known. Perhaps he saw all women as equally limited. If she could only show him different.

Numbers were a language in which almost anything might be expressed. Nor need one betray what one was about by writing them in the Roman or Arabic forms. The up and down strokes either side of a upright did just as well; the unlettered had used them to tally debts and record wagers for centuries. Better, they could easily be disguised as something else – for example, the fine hatching one used to indicate shade in pen-and-ink work.

Shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, her face protected from flies and the curiosity of passers-by beneath a fine-mesh veil, she directed Jean to set up a sketching stool and easel in various points of vantage around the castle. 

After two days she had compiled a respectable portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings. A military engineer might (had he troubled to concern himself with a gentlewoman’s little daubs and scratches) have noted the drawings’ unusual clarity when it came to issues such as sally ports, clear lines of fire, optimum positions for ordnance and location of wells and cisterns. 

Even such an engineer, though, would have been hard put to decode the clues built into details of decoration and ornament (ornament which, when compared to the original, might be seen to display a startling degree of artistic licence). But someone who knew what to look for might have noted that every single particular a besieging force might wish to know about the castle had been pinned elegantly to the paper.

She signed each one with the tiny acanthus device she had been accustomed to use, back in Gaaldine’s palace, to signify a sketch which held a puzzle (not that Sherlock had ever needed the hint, she recalled with a pang.)

When Lord Lestrade next called for her – when, perhaps, he would be holding in his hand the canon-law opinion which laid the path clear to their marriage – she would show him. She _would_ show him.

* * *

On the fifth day after her arrival, her resolve crumbled. She had told herself that she was not going to raise the matter again; she would wait for Lord Lestrade. Each time she had seen him, though, he had been distant and distracted, pacing along the terrace scanning the northern horizon or giving quick, low-voiced commands to his officers, commands which, as often as not, were negated a turn or so later. 

Nor had it escaped her notice that her _bête noire_ , the master of horse, seemed to have progressively fewer horses under his day-to-day command, nor that mounted troops passed daily out through the buttressed gateway, and did not return. 

By way of Jean, she learned of an oddly specific sequence of cattle and sheep raids on the farms to the east. It seemed almost as if someone were deliberately trying to provoke the great outlaw families who were also, in their own way, lords of the Borders. 

Charis knew what that meant. The great game of chess, played out across the centuries between the three kingdoms, had its own time-honed gambits and stratagems. Stirring up local banditry as cover for an incursion was a tactic which went back millennia.

War, then, was on the wind.

If so, in her private opinion, Lord Lestrade seemed distinctly lacking in preparation. That great German-style mansion, with all its glass, could withstand no sustained assault by ordnance, and yet no effort had been made either to disperse the household into the countryside or transfer their quarters into the older, more defensible parts of the castle. 

Perhaps, Charis told herself, with a kind of desperate optimism she barely believed herself, if she could get the marriage business sorted, it might free Lord Lestrade’s attention for matters military.

She chose the hour before the evening meal. Jean had revealed quite a talent as a tiring maid, at least for an up-country place where Charis was not expected to make formal appearances. She arrayed Charis in the lavender silk dress and did something simple but unexpectedly effective with her hair. Thus armoured, Charis went in search of Lord Lestrade.

She found him in his accounting room, head bent over a pile of deeds and papers. Flies buzzed around in a desultory way, doubtless drawn by the half-empty glass of sweet wine by his right hand. The casements were shut and the air stale and musty; it was not, she guessed, a room much frequented. He did not look up as she entered, but continued scowling at the mess on the desk with the air of a man who had added up the same column of figures with the same result nine times already, but nonetheless hoped the tenth time would prove the charm.

“My lord, have you had any news?”

His head jerked up. “News? What news? Why should I have had news?”

A horrid suspicion gripped her. “News of the canon law opinion on annulment, of course. Surely it should have arrived by now?”

He made no more than a token effort to rise, then waved her into a seat on the far side of the desk. ( _Like a steward, here for orders_ , a miserable inner voice observed.) 

“My dear girl, how charmingly naïve of you!” His laugh was horribly unconvincing. “Those of us who have had dealings with lawyers – for our sins – would scarcely have expected a response in under twice the time which has passed.”

It might be the difference between being royal and being merely noble, but her father, to say nothing of Mycroft, would have had the hide of any man of law who had the temerity to keep him hanging for the best part a week for an opinion. “But surely – when did you send for it?”

Lord Lestrade’s expression told her everything. In this, as in every other act since they had left Cavron, he had failed her; treated her not as a woman but a child, to be humoured, chided and misled.

“So you haven’t written. Not at all? When you said –”

“I said that you needed to consider very carefully the implications of such a step!” The words burst out, those of a man pressed to the end of his rope by the unreasonableness of those around him. “Look, when we spoke in Cavron, I believed we shared a certain understanding as to how things stood. It was wrong of you – very wrong indeed – to withhold important information and put me into this position in the first place.”

Blood rose and thundered in her ears. “Me, withhold information? And what about you? What about Mistress Donovan?”

“Leave Sally out of it. That’s quite a different thing. Whereas this – you idiotic girl, can’t you see how King James will respond to any attempt to annul your marriage and marry me? He will use every power at his disposal to stop it. _Every_ power, without quarter.”

It was as if Lord Lestrade had conjured the Pretender into the room. She felt the dissecting gaze of his cold, black eyes; heard the high voice he affected, which could swing from charm to murderous anger in a single beat; saw that characteristic shake of his head from side to side.

How on earth had she thought she could stand alone against him? The thought slipped out before she could stop it. _Alone_. At last her mind acknowledged what her heart had been telling her for days now. 

Defiantly, she sat up a little straighter. “Nonetheless. I would not have consented to come here without believing I could make everything honourable and above-board, no matter what it cost me. I stand by that. _I_ keep my promises.”

“Why, you – ” He half-rose from his chair, leant across the desk towards her, and sent his wine-glass flying, spreading its contents all across the desk. Charis pushed back her chair only just in time to save the lavender silk.

The interruption, damn it, gave Lord Lestrade a chance to regroup. By the time the wine-sodden papers had been removed by his clerk, and they were alone again, he had regained much of his normal poise. He cupped his chin in his hands and summoned the soulful expression she had always found so irresistible before.

“Look, suppose you went through all that degradation and did _not_ emerge a free woman? Suppose the canon court held your marriage to that Gaaldine popinjay valid? Suppose they disbelieved your protestations of virginity?”

For a moment she thought she had misheard. Then she recognised the glint in his eye, that of a man who has laid an unbeatable hand down on the card table, and knew she had not.

Even in the stifling, late-afternoon heat, Charis’s teeth began to chatter. Only the energy of anger let her speak at all.

“How can they disagree with the evidence of their own eyes? In such cases, I am led to understand, there is an – an examination carried out by a qualified physician, in the presence of a jury of pious matrons. It will be unpleasant, doubtless, but _I_ am confident in the outcome. And it had not, before, occurred to me that any man who lays claim to the title of gentleman could doubt my given word on a point of such a nature.”

He raised a languid hand in a gesture of deprecation. “I’m not talking about _my_ doubts. I’m talking about how it will appear, or can be made to appear, that you satisfy the appearance of a maiden, but nonetheless are nothing of the sort. The suspicion which will arise – and it gives me no pleasure to mention it – will derive almost as a matter of course from your husband’s _notorious_ preferences in matters of the flesh. But I can hardly discuss that point further. It’s not a topic fit to be discussed with a gently-raised young lady.”

It required no effort to make her voice icy. “It seems, Lord Lestrade, that if you are correct it _will_ be raised in a court of canon law, before an entire crowd of lawyers, churchmen, interested parties and general hangers-on. It would surely be no more than practical common sense to inform me of it now, in private.”

“I wanted to spare you this,” Lord Lestrade said. In a characteristic tic, his tongue flickered out to moisten his lips. “But, since you press the matter, your husband has _long_ been known to use boys after the manner of the Bulgars. I hardly like to mention this to you, but apparently there exist women so depraved that they also allow themselves to be so used.”

“I know about _that_ ,” Charis said. “We had one in the hospital once. One of the girls from one of the houses – not Big Gertie’s, of course – but the man must have used her far too forcibly in that way. She had a most terrible fistula, and Sarai almost despaired.”

Lord Lestrade went first dead white, then red. “You can’t say things like that.”

“I just _did_ say it.” The knowledge that she had succeeded in shocking him made her feel better, a very little.

“Well, don’t say it again. Coarseness on your part creates the worst possible impression. The very fact of your knowing of such matters will create suspicions as to how you came by that knowledge.”

“I told you. It was by working at the hospital.”

“Quite.” His tone held a hint of savage pleasure. Instinct screamed, _Walk wary._

“What’s wrong with working at the hospital? Neither the King nor Sherlock have raised any objection. Besides, it’s a work of charity, and I’m good at it.”

“So they tell me.” The savage note deepened; there was assuredly something unpleasant coming. “A job no woman of quality should stoop to, and yet you do it as if to the manner born. Have you never wondered why that might be so?”

“Lord Lestrade.” She knew, as surely as when it happened in the fencing salle, she had lost the initiative. Nevertheless, she would not concede the bout. “I beg you, make yourself intelligible. I cannot see what bearing my charitable works at the Poor Persons’ Hospital have on this matter.”

“No, you wouldn’t. I don’t doubt that the matter was carefully kept from your ears. And no-one with any hope of preferment at the Court of Gondal would be likely to raise it, either. Men have been exiled for less. Or worse.”

“Again, intelligible, Lord Lestrade?”

“Since you force my hand. If you were free to marry me tomorrow and the King’s disfavour were by some miracle not a consideration, nonetheless most of my friends at Court and _all_ my surviving family would counsel me against it, for the sake of my posterity.” 

Pompous really didn’t suit him, she thought irrelevantly, before she decoded what he was actually saying.

“What? But I –”

He raised his hand again. “Please. You demanded my explanation. For God’s sake, then, stay quiet and let me give it. For more than five generations my family can show untainted noble ancestry. No commoner, still less a bastard, has married into the house of Lestrade in all that time. Our records on the point are meticulous. But – since you came in here to talk about matters of canon law – I know as a certain fact that King James holds a cardinal’s opinion, based on credible testimony, which shows you to be both bastard _and_ commoner.”

The room spun. She gripped hard at the arm-rests of the carved oak chair and prayed for smelling salts. Deep breaths had to suffice. After a second or so she raised her head and glared at him.

“You – how _dare_ –?”

“I dare do no more than say aloud what has been whispered in every corner of the Court since first your mother was with child.”

Logic raised its head, inopportunely. “You can’t possibly know that. You were no more than six yourself when I was born. You weren’t _at_ court.”

“Oh, Charis, do grow up. Whether at Court or not, I heard the rumours from my earliest years. I put them down to malicious gossip, naturally. But his grace the King cannot afford to be so generous, however his personal inclinations may lie.”

“Trust me, I know quite enough of the Pretender’s personal inclinations.” Charis paused. “And of his lies. Doubtless, this is all some contrivance of _his_. He’s had long enough to plan it. And to set rumours running in support.”

“Don’t be absurd. And for Christ’s sake, keep your voice down. And don’t use that term. If you can’t bear to give his grace his proper title, use nothing, rather than call him that.”

She nodded, tight-lipped. “Go on. These are the basest falsehoods, but let’s hear them out.” 

_Marguerite_ sounded as a counter-chime in the back of her mind. Her lady of the bedchamber had been dead for more than eighteen months, but certain hints and portents she had dropped, over the years (dismissal or death for saying more, of course, _that_ rang true) came uneasily to mind. 

“Well, of recent years your late – that is, King Ambrosine – neglected many things which should have been attended to. Now, King James’s necessary reforms and the tax exactions to pay for them have made him unpopular in certain quarters.”

“It could only have been a matter of time before his greed and cruelty became more widely known.”

“Charis, will you shut up? You’re in Gondal now; this is no place to talk sedition. Which, come to think of it, circles us back to the matter under hand. Chief among his grace’s opponents is a rabble of malcontents and treason-mongers who call themselves the Modernists –”

“Papa would never have called them treason-mongers. I believe he had a secret hankering for their ideas himself, but he never thought the time was ripe to bring it up in Council. Many times I’ve heard John say he wished he had, and perhaps had he not become ill when he did he’d have had the energy to do it. John, my physician, you see, was a leader of the Modernist cause.”

“No wonder, since he stood to gain the most from it.”

She sensed an abyss yawning below her. “What do you mean?”

Lord Lestrade gave a smile of smug satisfaction. “What, I told you the King had a cardinal’s opinion proving your bastardy, and you never thought to ask who your true father was?”

She was too sharp not to sense where this was going. “Holy Virgin. John?”

“The very same. John Watson. The son and grandson of surgeons – that accounts for your low taste for blood and gore, doubtless. As for the late Queen’s low taste – well, who can say? But if the Modernists had had their way, Watson would have seen his light-skirt’s base-born get upon the throne of Gondal. What a triumph for an army sawbones, that.”

A hot defence of Mama rose to her lips – and stayed there. What, after all, was there to say? Lord Lestrade had, in truth, laid down an unbeatable hand.

“Excuse me,” she said, her throat so choked as to make her voice almost unrecognisable. “I must go to my chamber.”

She had no idea how she got there, and only the vaguest memory of waving away Jean and the serving maid who bore her evening meal upon a platter. For a long time she sat on her bed, dry-eyed yet shaking, thoughts circling inside her head, unstoppable and unchanging. 

Mama and John. John and Mama. Mama. Beloved Mama: lost once and now lost again. Mama. A forsworn wife, a wanton, a whore, something less than the dung on a man’s shoe.

And with John, too. John: her friend, her confidant, her physician – the director of her studies, too, before the nuns, as governesses came and went – and all the time this secret lying at the heart of all. What could John have been thinking, so to betray Papa, his friend, his patient and his king? 

Poor Papa – beloved, distant, amused Papa – whom she supposed she ought now think of as “his grace”, like any other bastard commoner. 

And then, bitterest and last, as it had been bitterest and first, Mama.

 _My true parent._

“Like mother, like daughter.” So the Court dowagers would clack, when news of Charis’s disgrace reached Gondal town. 

Lord Lestrade would never have married her. She saw that now. The dowagers would have seen it from the beginning. The wanton daughter of a wanton mother, starting a little early on the path bad blood marked out for her. That was what they would say. That was what she had let herself become.

And poor, poor Sherlock. Trapped by deceit into marrying a sham princess, enviegled into a marriage he could never have wanted in the first place. ( _Known to use boys after the manner of the Bulgars_. Not that she had ever seen evidence of anything of the sort, but how could she trust her judgement here, when it had failed her so in every other instance?)

At the thought of Sherlock, a very faint flickering of light eased the utter blackness of despair. A cold kind of light, like those the country folk lit over the newly interred, but light, nonetheless.

She had abandoned honour and had no hope of mercy. There remained, though, the chance of doing one small act of reparation. Sherlock should not be forced to live shackled to a forsworn wife, wearing a cuckold’s horns and enduring the scorn of the Pretender and all his cronies. There was, at least, something she could do about that.

Charis rose from the bed – her limbs had stiffened from long sitting – and stalked towards the stair to the roof-walk, head held high.


	8. Chapter 8

She stood frozen in her position on the parapet, hardly daring to turn her head. On the very fringe of view, Sally emerged from the shadows.

“Of course,” Sally added, “if being scraped off the cobbles is your idea of fun, don’t let me stop you, but in your position I’d not be minded to give him the satisfaction, personally.”

Charis’s voice came out surprisingly steady. “What choice do I have?”

“Well, I dunno, but it’s got to be more choice than you’d have being dead, isn’t it?” 

The courtyard below lurched, sickeningly. For a panicked moment Charis clutched at the parapet edge unsure if – irony beyond irony – she had not gone past the point of no return. Then firm hands gripped her waist and a second later she felt the warm leads of the roof through the thin soles of her evening slippers.

Her knees were oddly weak. She had to lean on Sally’s arm to get as far as the stone bench. She sank down, head in hands, and was conscious of Sally sitting down next to her, though the other woman, blessedly, remained silent.

After taking several deep breaths, Charis raised her head. “Why are you helping me?”

Sally shrugged. “Like I said, a girl’s got more choices if she’s not dead. Goes for me as well as you. And you’re not a safe person to be near, you. Dead _or_ alive.” Her voice changed. “I take it, from being brought up in the palace, you’d have met _him_?”

“Him?” The question was the merest pretence. No other man in Gondal – doubtless no other man in the three kingdoms – commanded such an intonation.

Sally made a rough, impatient sound at the back of her throat. “Well? Have you?”

Charis dipped her head. “The Pretender? He who now styles himself King James of Gondal? Yes.” Her mouth was dry; she swallowed. “He is, you know, my uncle.”

 _Though by repute only, not blood._ That sudden insight was too complicated to deal with yet. There was too much bitterness mixed with the relief. She continued onto less shaky ground.

“There is no deed so vile I could not believe him capable of it. My betrothal, you know, to Sherlock – that came about because my – because the late King feared that once he was no longer able to protect me, Prince James would drag me to his bed, whether he could find a priest to bless the match or not. Trusting more to Gondal’s ancient enemy than his own brother – think of that!”

Words ran out. She was left looking down at the leads, stirring the withered rose petals with one slippered foot.

“Ah.” Sally’s contemplative monosyllable carried unlooked-for ease. “So I was right. No –” her hand lifted, arresting any further words from Charis. “Listen to me, for once. We’ve not got much time. Rupert’s not going to listen to either of us – I take it you’ve noticed that about him by now? – but I’ve got my ears to the ground and I keep them there. From things I’ve heard, I don’t think the King – the Pretender, whatever – trusts anyone, and the closer they are to him, the less he trusts them.”

“Yes. That is most assuredly true.” What inexpressible relief, to be able to have a frank conversation. It was almost like talking to Sarai. Or even to – her thoughts skittered away. When she had at length collected them, Sally was in full flood.

“– so our factor in Exina said, ‘He’ll be turning his attention South, after that humiliation’ – can you imagine, actually _pickled_? – ‘and God help anyone who he decides to take out his temper on.’ I’ve heard Brenzaida’s people were buying in spices and spermaceti last week as if to corner the market, and Brenzaida’s seat isn’t more than a day’s ride north, as the crow flies –”

“Stop!” It seemed her heart were bent on bursting through her chest. Once again she cursed the new French stays. “You mean to tell me the Pretender’s on a progress through the Southern borders? That he’s coming _here_? And Lord Lestrade neither knows nor wishes to be told?”

The horror of _that_ thought sent her eyes to the parapet again. Better dead than fall alive into the Pretender’s hands, yes, and be _damned_ to pious doubts. -If the lives of the Saints told one anything, it was that self-slaughter in such circumstances came all-but adjacent to a sacrament. 

Sally’s hand described an emphatic arc in the air.

“That’s about the size of it. And there’s no chance of you hiding behind that ‘gentlewoman of Gaaldine’ rubbish. Quite apart from anything else, there’s not a servant or arms-man in the place who wouldn’t sell you out if they saw a chance of Royal favour at the bottom of it.”

“Say, rather, of hoping to avert his _disfavour_.” Charis pursed her lips, struck by a sudden thought. “Though the time for that would have been before I entered the castle. Each turn since then will be accounted a further betrayal by the Pretender, when he learns of it.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it.” Sally put her head on one side. “Not the most cheerful, granted, but at least it’s honest. Anyway, our chances of getting away with it may not look good, but they’ll be a damn sight better if at least you aren’t here when he arrives. And if I have a chance to work on Rupert, without you to distract him.”

Even after all that had happened, that casual observation _hurt_. Ignoring the throbbing ache beneath her breastbone, Charis, after a moment, said, “But how am I to leave the castle? Surely the guards –?”

Sally grinned; it had a disturbing, berserker edge to it. “You missed dinner these four nights. Trust me, you had the best of it. But, as it is, you won’t know the guards are spread uncommonly thin at present. First, there’ve been raids on the farms up on the high pastures.”

“I know. Jean said. Not just any farms, either. Those under the protection of the Nixons, the Armstrongs and the Bells. Someone’s stirring trouble.”

“Are they, indeed?” Sally’s face was full of alert interest. “Well, whoever it is, count them your guardian angel. A couple of troop and their officers have been drawn off looking after that. Then, my lord’s assistant factor turned up yesterday in some ditch just off the high road. Head beaten in. No shortage of suspects, mind you; I doubt there’s a man in six villages who’s got a good word to say for him. In fact, if any did, they’d be the first _I’d_ call in for interrogation. But anyway, that’s drawn off another half troop.”

She drew a deep breath. “Next, there was a skirmish down in the village between that bastard Lord Fernihurst’s men – I’ll be coming to him presently – and the castle’s. Two or three in the infirmary on either side and four or five more in irons. Not such a big deal, any other time of year. But – well. What with half the castle’s men off showing Rupert’s colours at the local festivals or going sick to help out on the family farm in the busy season –”

“Protecting their own holdings against Bell or Armstrong reprisals, you mean.” Charis might have been raised in a palace, but she remained a child of the Borders.

“That too, I daresay. Anyway, with one thing and another, I doubt there’s more than a dozen able-bodied men on guard duty tonight, if that. One good clamour, and the whole place will be like an ant-heap. No-one’s going to pay any mind to some scruff of a page-boy making himself scarce in the opposite direction.”

Silence hung between them for a second or so, after which Sally added, “There’s all that’s necessary made ready in my chamber. I mean – clothes and stuff. A dagger. Water. Pistols, power-flask and shot. Money. And I’ve taken saddle-bags and tack down to that paddock where they’ve put that horse of yours. By midnight tonight you could be off to the Border, and no-one the wiser ’till midmorning tomorrow.”

_The guards may be spread thin, but they are nonetheless present._

Fear struck sparks along Charis’s nerves. Surely this must be another trap? Some contrivance of the Pretender – it would be his style, surely, to make her feel she had gained her freedom only to close the trap around her at the last possible moment. Or perhaps it was all a wronged woman’s vengeance. Either could kill her, easily as blinking.

Once the initial terror had passed, her limbs felt limp. Even speaking seemed like lifting an enormous burden, at which every sinew trembled.

“You promise much. And, truly, if you can do this, my gratitude _will_ be endless. But the guards may be thinly spread, but they are not non-existent. How do you propose I break free of the castle, let alone the whole estate?”

Sally nodded. “I told you I was coming to Lord Fernihurst, didn’t I? Well. That man’s rotten. All through rotten– there’s not a place you could poke a finger without letting daylight in from the other side. You could describe him fifty thousand ways, and forty-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them would end in ‘-it’, know what I mean?”

Charis thought, but did not say, that Sally could profit from a week with the Castellan. It would vary her store of invective. 

“Go on.”

“Well. Fernihurst’s taken care, a time or two lately, to draw attention to how he surmises matters stand between me and Rupert. Oh, he began even before the Pentecost Fair, but you can see how that would have gingered him up. And tonight at dinner – well, he was getting above himself but at least being amusing about it, for once, and Rupert wasn’t paying attention and I may – I just may – have said the odd thing I didn’t mean, in the hope of getting a reaction I didn’t get. A reaction from Rupert, I mean. As far as Fernihurst goes, he’s convinced if he shows up at my chambers tonight, it’ll be away to the races. He’s that sort. He’ll be up as soon as the drinking starts to die off. That’ll give you the clamour you need. You’d be surprised at the racket I can make, given sufficient provocation.”

Once again, Charis refrained from speaking her thoughts aloud. Instead, she said, “But what about you?”

Sally shrugged. “You don’t suppose I’d have lasted this long here if I hadn’t learned a few tricks for dealing with trouble? Also, it should give Rupert a chance to show if he does care, after all.”

The bleakness of Sally’s expression – even in the half-light – did not encourage further enquiry. Instead, Charis said, “I do not know how things stand in Gaaldine at present, and I prefer not to make promises I may not be able to keep. But, if I win through, I will owe you a great deal, and I was taught one should pay one’s debts.”

Sally snorted. “Not the same school Rupert went to, then.”

Tales of the wild young Lestrade, orphaned early and in consequence lacking a firm paternal hand to restrain him, had swirled round the court like the dust-devils of summer. Charis coughed.. “Doubtless not. Nevertheless.” She cleared her throat again, almost overcome with embarrassment. One gave gifts to one’s entourage and people one wished to favour, naturally, it was a matter of course, But how to handle the matter in such a case? 

She swallowed. “If I can do anything, I wish to offer you a monopoly. In your own right, I mean, irrespective of any husband you may marry. Have you any suggestions? I do not know what may be coming up –”

“Antimony,” Sally said abruptly. “Or arsenic. I’m not particular. One of those metals or demi-metals everyone uses and no-one pays attention to. Something imported.You can make a lot out of those, and if local politics get too hot for you, you can always slope off seeing to the mines until the storm blows over.”

Charis nodded. Then, feeling awkward and inadequate, she opened her arms and gave Sally a stiff hug.

“God save us,” she breathed into the other girl’s ear, “and the Holy Virgin send us both a good deliverance.”


	9. Chapter 9

“Stop!” The voice out of the shadows beneath the olive trees made her jump. Though her hands shook, she continued tugging at the girth, jabbing the Creature with a sharp elbow, to hinder his attempts to blow himself out.

A dark blur detached itself from the grove at the end of the paddock and advanced. 

“Ma’am. You must go back. You must go back inside.” 

She knew the voice; it was Sam’s. She gave the girth one final tug and scrambled aboard the Creature’s back just as he reached them.

“I can’t go back.” 

Infuriatingly, her voice came out breathy, girlish and shaky. Emboldened, Sam reached out and caught the Creature’s reins. The Creature tossed his head and raked with his forefoot. Her right hand reached down to pat his neck, her knees against his flanks signalling the same subtle message.

_Easy, boy. Not yet._

Unseen by Sam, Charis’s left hand crawled, inch by inch, to her pistol.

“Let go my reins.” That was better; it came out sharp and authoritative. 

Sam hung on. “Ma’am, they say his grace the King lies tonight barely more than a day’s ride from Castle Lestrade. His anger will be terrible, should he arrive and find you fled.”

“He won’t find _me_ fled.” Her fingers caressed the inlay of metal in the smooth mahogany of the pistol butt. “Should anyone enquire, the lady who has left so abruptly is a gentry-woman of north Gaaldine. You know Lord Lestrade’s orders.”

The silence spoke louder than words could have done. 

“What? You would disobey your master? You would betray Lord Lestrade to the King? You would – ” 

Even as she spoke the grip of her fingers was tightening around the pistol’s butt. Her thumb rested, promise as much as threat, upon its cock.

Sam’s voice rang with desperate sincerity.

“I have to, ma’am. Whatever his orders, Lord Lestrade doesn’t under– That is, my brother’s gone horse boy to the Royal Stables and he’s told me things. His grace the King never forgives dereliction.”

“He never forgives loyalty, either. It just takes longer.” The words came out of nowhere. They fell into the shadowy paddock with the flat, echo-less sound of absolute truth.

“No, ma’am!” Sam dropped his grip on the reins and lunged for her body. The Creature – responding to Charis’s thought as much as to the commands of hand and leg – swung, barging Sam to the ground with a sideways blow of his shoulder. He lay on his back, blinking up at her, aware for the first time of the pistol in her hand.

“You aren’t going to use that, ma’am.”

He sounded much too assured.

“Don’t. Make. Me.” Charis’s teeth were set; her mind calculating odds and distances. The Pretender was where? Perhaps fifteen leagues to the north-east. Lord Lestrade a few hundred yards away in the castle. No point in worrying about Sally. At least the girl had a merchant’s facility for assessing profit and loss, and no illusions about nobility or majesty cluttering up her thoughts. 

Sam propped himself up on his elbows. “Now, miss. Give over.” His voice was losing even the barest pretence of respect. Soon, a small, detached part of her mind told her, he would yell for assistance.

She had brought the Pretender’s wrath upon them all, she and Lord Lestrade between them. Something to live with, if she lived at all. But she could not fall prisoner of the Pretender, no matter how many lives stood between her and escape.

“Go.” She waved the muzzle of the pistol. “Run. Turn outlaw. But do not for the love of the Holy Virgin let him find you here.”

Sam scrambled to his feet and leapt towards her. She squeezed the trigger; he fell backwards, his mouth open in shock.

She gathered up the reins and turned the Creature’s head toward the vast dim bulk of the hills to the south, dark against the swirling starfire of the sky. 

Behind her a voice gasped, thin and reedy, with an ominous whistle in it, “God bless his grace King Jam–”

A clotted gasp drowned the rest. She spurred the Creature down the rutted cart-track and did not look back.

Another shape emerged from the farthest side of the olive grove. He bent, briefly, over the body of the fallen groom. When all had been done there that needed to be done he whistled up his own horse, and, keeping always to the woodland and shadow, set off along the same route the girl had taken.

Two and a half days or more to Cavron Castle assuming she was making that way (where else could she go?) All the normal dangers for a girl travelling alone, multiplied ten-fold by the Border lands’ lawlessness and the whole area buzzing with rumours of the Pretender’s proximity. 

One would not lay money on her surviving, save at the most extravagant of odds. Nevertheless – 

There was no-one to see, which was perhaps fortunate. His smile had a wild-cat’s bared-teeth ferocity.

The girl came of gambling stock; gamblers, too, who unlike that unspeakable fool Lestrade weighed the risks before taking them anyway.

It was time to see what he could do to adjust those odds.


	10. Chapter 10

As she led the Creature up the steep street below Castle Cavron, Charis realised she had no idea what she was going to do next. 

During the three blurred days and two nights which had passed since her leaving Lestrade’s castle, Cavron had been the only place she could think to head for. Now she was here, practical difficulties overwhelmed her.

The sun was westering low behind the mountains; the evening guard would be in place by now. She could not pass the gate without revealing her real identity. Then, first the castle garrison, then the village, then the whole of the three kingdoms would know her disgrace. And suppose the Castellan, alarmed by her absence, had sent word to the King? Suppose Mycroft were, even now, sitting behind those forbidding stone walls, ready to pass judgement on a forsworn Royal wife?

The familiar frontage of _The Mariner’s Rest_ loomed up ahead. It gave her dulled wits something to cling onto. She slid to the ground and led the Creature round to the stable-yard. Then she knocked on the back door, trying to dredge up from some corner of her brain the pattern of knocks Phyllis had used on the day of the race.

Whether she’d succeeded or by sheer coincidence, Horatio himself opened the door. 

He took in her travel-stained appearance in one glance. “So, _mon brave_ , you have returned to us. You are very welcome.”

He whistled for a boy to take her horse. The Creature must have been as overwhelmed as his rider. He suffered himself to be taken to a strange stable without even a token nip or hiss.

Horatio half-led, half-carried her indoors. He had done so after the horse-race, she thought, with a kind of dim misery. How much she had thrown away, all unwitting of her good fortune, since that glorious afternoon.

He sat her in his own parlour and wiped the white dust of summer off face, hands and feet. He brought her pale, greenish wine, which fell on her dust-dessicated throat cool and reviving as spring water. He soothed her myriad scratches and insect bites with a salve compounded of mountain honey and astringent herbs. And, last and best of all, by some means unseen and uncomprehended, he brought her Annie. 

“Ma’am, I’m right glad to see you. But you look worn out. Just let me get you up to the castle and I’ll see you have a hot bath and get straight to bed.”

Her own voice sounded very dull, very faint and very far away. “But what will we say to the Castellan?”

She had been missing for ten days. Search parties would surely have been sent out. Lady Backwater, for one, would have shared her suspicions of Charis’s whereabouts with anyone who would listen. Someone might even have seen them at the village church or – heaven forbid! – on the chapel garth. 

“No need to worry, ma’am.” Annie nodded, as if to underline the reassurance in her voice. “The Castellan’s been away since before we found your bed empty. Your husband’s colonel got word of a big cattle-raid that was planned, out on the western edge of the march. Three or four riding families from the North, all in alliance. Colonel Wardlaw thought it might be a cover for something bigger, a raid by Gondal, maybe, ma’am, but the Castellan said it just needed to be stopped on general principles, ’specially right after the truce, otherwise it made us look silly.”

Fury swept through Charis with the reviving warmth of the Border spirit.

“But neither Colonel Wardlaw nor the Castellan saw fit to tell _me_? Such rumours could be a feint, to draw Cavron’s defences away from the Pass!”

 _I would never have left the castle, had I known such a raid on foot._ Not that such thoughts could change the past. Still –

“Hell’s teeth – has no officer in this unhallowed shit-hole ever been taught that incomplete intelligence kills more men than ordnance?”

An answering spark lit in Annie’s expression.

“Ma’am. I think you should say that to the Castellan, when he gets back. You’re in charge here, no-one else. It’s past time everyone knew it.”

“And never was a truer word spoken.” Horatio’s braids bounced as he nodded. “Besides, taking the fight to the enemy is a sound stratagem, _mon brave_.”

Like the Border spirit, her rage evaporated abruptly. Its passing left her dry-mouthed, heart thudding, overwhelmed by weariness. Take the fight to the enemy? She had no fight left in her.

“Come, ma’am. Time we were going.” Annie slid an arm around her shoulders easing her to her feet. She allowed herself to be led out of the back door, wrapped once more in a rust-black, all-concealing shawl. Leaning on Annie’s arm, she made a slow, weaving process up the main street, through the warm, murmuring dusk, thick with bat-wings and the pungent scent of drying horse dung.

It was only when they were at the castle postern, and Annie was reaching into the folds of her gown for a set of keys she most assuredly should not have had, that she managed to summon up enough energy to utter the question she had been forming ever since they left the _Mariner’s Rest._

“Annie, why? Why stick your neck out for me? You need to be careful. It’s not as if it’s just the Castellan. It might even get you in trouble with the King.”

“Why, ma’am, didn’t you know? You took the ride for us. You’re one of us now. And you’re nothing if you don’t stand by your own. ’Specially on the Borders. Steady, ma’am. Not much further, now. Just a few steps up here, and we can get you into that bath.”


	11. Chapter 11

The aromatic steam of the bath lulled her into a semblance of peace. Her eyelids drooped. She heard the servants’ door creak open, the noise of a bottle being uncorked. The pungency of clove soap filled the room. She leant back and motioned with one finger, giving permission for the maid to touch her.

The hands massaging her temples were far larger than any hands had any right to be. She twisted her head, and looked up into her husband’s uncompromising eyes.

Her bones turned to powder, her sinews to mush, her guts to a roiling cauldron of acid. Once she had decided to return, she had known the moment would come when she must face Sherlock and confess what she had done. She had not imagined it would come so soon.

They were alone in the room. Annie, no doubt, had kept the servants below. If Sherlock killed her, now, no-one would even hear her cry for help. Worse, she would die a forsworn wife _and_ a virgin, forever bearing the disgrace of unchastity while never having managed to find out _what the fuss was all about_. 

She let out a whimper of misery.

“Don’t. You are in no danger, not now.” Sherlock’s voice held neither the fury she had feared nor the cold detachment she had expected. 

She twisted her body in the bath, slopping water onto the floor – odd, to notice that, in such a crisis. She had to get the words out before her last shred of courage failed. 

“You are entitled to annul our marriage. You were most grievously deceived on entering into it. I am not the woman you thought I was.”

His eye travelled up and down her naked form. She dismissed as absurd the idea of snatching up a towel. What good did the _pretence_ of modesty do now? Anyway, the towels were all out of reach, behind Sherlock. 

“I can see no evidence for that proposition. Elucidate.”

“Lord Lestrade –” Somehow, pronouncing his name aloud made the situation unendurable. She dissolved into tears and found them being mopped away with a flannel.

“That fuckwitted beef-brain.” Sherlock held out one of the larger towels. She stood while he dried her – she was too apathetic to do more – and then wrapped her in a robe. “Come. Whatever my brother’s builders can do, no-one could ever take the draughts out of Castle Cavron. I’m not having you die of an affliction of the lungs after watching you safe all the way back from Gondal.”

 _Safe._ Not _In no danger_ as he had said at first, but _safe_.

Her knees buckled. Since riding out ten days ago – even earlier, since she had seen the rose on her pillow and first contemplated the fine adventure which had turned into such a small, squalid thing – she had never felt _safe_. At first, she had ridden on an exquisite knife-edge, between terror and exhilaration. But then the knife had turned blunt, the endless onslaught of petty alarms and insults deadened her nerves, and she had seen no end to fear.

And yet Sherlock had watched over her. All through that nightmare journey – the ever-present terror of discovery by suspicious villagers taking a second look at a strange boy riding late, the cold nights snatching sleep up trees, the alarms of bear or wolf, the fear that the Creature might be going lame, that time they had only just got off the road and into a thicket as a troop of cattle-raiders had stormed past, hooves muffled – all that time she had had a protector. 

_Safe._

Sherlock stooped and caught her up in his arms. She rested her cheek against his shirt’s fine linen, breathed in his citrus-and-civet scent, heard the deep thud of his heartbeat, felt his muscles cord as he shouldered her weight. 

She had dreamt of Lord Lestrade doing this. What a fool she had been. 

“I _thought_ I was being followed. Even after – after.”

“After you killed Lestrade’s groom?”

“Oh. I did kill him, then?” Sam’s clotted, cut-off words would echo in her ears for years to come, but it seemed important, somehow, to emulate Sherlock’s dispassionate tone.

“Indeed. Not quite a clean shot – though creditable, given the light. It would have done its work, in an hour or so. I finished him off and tumbled the body into a dry ditch, before his cries attracted all the carrion-scenters of the Borders.” 

Sherlock kicked open the bedroom door. The scent of roses drifted up from the night-blanketed garden below. Moonlight streamed in, defining everything with the sharp-edged clarity of fretwork. The bed-curtains moved gently in the draught from the window. They were a light summer muslin, printed with storks and bulrushes, not the heavy brocade she had found so oppressive on the last night she had lain here. Phyllis must have ordered them changed, trusting – despite everything – to her return.

Sherlock set her down on the bed and swung himself up besides her, stretching out full length, not quite touching her. The moonlight turned his skin to alabaster. It brought Charis in mind of the carved figures on the tombs of her ancestors, in the Cathedral of SS Augusta and Geraldine, back home.

 _Safe_. One would be safe inside one of those marble sepulchres. Cool. Quiet. Enclosed. Protected.

Except at the last judgement, when all the dead, even those lying in the royal tombs, must rise at the trumpet’s sound. Adultery, even if only in her heart, was most surely a mortal sin. She had known that on Lord Lestrade’s roof walk.

 _All the dead. Mama_. Whose adultery had not remained in her heart. Charis was her mother’s sin made flesh.

“Don’t.” Sherlock’s voice rang out in the silence of the moonlit room. “I can hear you think, and it pains me.” 

She might have spoken, but his clipped, elegant hand movement commanded silence.

“I spent days camped below that preposterous folly of Lestrade’s. The young lord of Sancta Maria inter Prata loaned me a falcon. Bless her and the master who trained her, she picked off every pigeon Lestrade tried to send.”

“Pigeons? From Lord Lestrade to whom?” 

“Who’d you think?” Her husband’s voice mingled equal parts ferocity and contempt. “Lestrade’s lord and master. The Pretender.”

The last shred of hope dropped away. What a child she had been. And it _hurt_.

Sherlock pushed himself up onto one elbow. The moonlight cast odd shadows, deepening his eye sockets, turning his face into that of a man who had starved for months.

“I’ve read the messages they carried. I know you return to Cavron as virgin as you left it. I expect Lestrade enjoyed a hearty laugh at my expense when he learned of your maiden state?”

She ducked her head, bright crimson, avoiding his gaze. 

Amusement rippled in her husband’s voice. “Don’t look so stricken. The laugh’s on Lestrade. Doubtless he’d promised you the moon and stars, if – that little ‘if’ so dear to the practised seducer of married women – _if_ only your inconvenient husband were not in the way. And then you turned round and told him all you needed to achieve _that_ was an examination by a jury of pious matrons and a modicum of self-restraint in the mean-time.”

“Don’t mock me.” 

He reached out to clasp her wrist. The ball of his thumb played over the pulse-point there. Her blood leapt erratically in response.

“Mock you? I admire you. Beset with enemies, deceived by someone who played on the affection you’d cherished for him as a child, you still tried to steer the most honourable course for all parties concerned. I’d not have done nearly so well. Indeed, I freely admit I have _not_ done so well. You have far more right to complain of my behaviour to you than the converse.”

His voice dropped to its lowest register.

“It’s long past time we spoke honestly. If, at the end of everything I have to say, you feel the right thing for us both – and for Gondal – is an application to that jury of pious matrons, then I shall not oppose you. But trust me, Charis, I do not wish for such an outcome. I most truly do not wish it.” 

Her throat closed up. She managed a nod, giving him leave to continue. Rather than do so immediately, he drew her to her feet, and arranged her robe about her shoulders.

“Come with me to the window. I want to show you something.”

He settled her on the window seat but did not sit himself; rather, he stood close behind her, so his warm breath tickled the back of her neck. 

“Look, over to the left. That tower, there.”

Its monumental scale blocked the sky. Chill dread, even at this remove, breathed from its very stones.

“The tower where the King your grandfather died?” Even now, two decades later, that great spectre hung over its turrets. 

“Yes.” Sherlock drew a deep breath. “And in dying gave me life. And to think he always accused _me_ of counterfeiting a woman’s part.”

The words came like a blow, touching upon her deepest and most private fear: a death such as Mama’s. Her husband’s hand grasped her shoulder, ungentle but curiously reassuring.

“Your pardon. I only meant that though Castle Cavron may wear a grim aspect, for me it is a place of hope unlooked for, coming out of the blackest despair. And a place of second chances.”

Hope flickered; she tamped it down. “Second chances? In _such_ a case? You know what my intentions were on riding forth from here. In my heart I committed the sin; that I did not complete it was happenstance.”

He made a chopped, dismissive gesture.

“Princes attract the ambitious like raw meat attracts flies. Flatterers and deceivers fasten on us. Not one in a thousand – ten thousand – of those who pledge their love is truly disinterested. Yet it is so lonely here on the heights, and some of the counterfeits pass very like true coin.”

“Lord Lestrade was always a favourite with Papa –” The unlucky word reminded her of other miseries. “Sherlock, I must tell you. There is another basis on which you must annul our marriage.” 

The formal routine of challenge, password and countersign sounded from the garden below: the castle guard changing watch. It was a framework which had defined her life, differing only in detail between Gaaldine and Gondal, between palace and castle. Tonight it seemed calculated to mock her. 

Tears welled up again. “The Pretender holds a cardinal’s opinion which states my b-bastardy can be ruled certain. He has named John as my natural father. Even had I been legitimate, I would not have had noble rank, let alone royal. I am no fit wife for the heir of Gaaldine.”

The grip on her shoulder tightened.

“Sssh. The opinion’s an absurdity; the maunderings of an old man with a known bee in his bonnet. It will not bear close examination. Doubtless the Pretender intended to hold it _in terrorem_ , not publish it to the four winds. I told you Lestrade was a blabbering lackwit.”

“You _knew_ of it?”

Sherlock shrugged. “Big Gertie’s reach puts the King’s own intelligencers to shame. But you should not have worried. Kingdoms would fall if the acknowledged children of a marriage could be declared bastard after their parents’ deaths. So the Archbishop said. Mycroft consulted him, when our marriage was first mooted. He consulted him a second time, after news of the Cardinal’s opinion reached us.”

Her stomach took an unpleasant lurch downwards. “The King sought the Archbishop’s view on my legitimacy? He perceived a risk?”

The guards had passed on, the gardens returned to their accustomed quiet, broken only by the natural sounds of the night: the breeze among the bushes, the dripping of water from the fountain, a cut-off, dying squeal from a rabbit taken by a predator. 

“Of _course_ he perceived a risk. The whole treaty was a risk. Attacking your legitimacy was an obvious step. Obvious to the Pretender’s advisors, at least. James of Gondal never makes the obvious move, at least, never for the obvious reason. It’s what makes him dangerous.”

“So I’m not a bastard?”

“No.” Sherlock sounded very assured. “Not in the eyes of the Church and in the eyes – more to the point – of the C ourt of Gondal. To whom King Ambrosine never, ever, behaved for the smallest instant as if you were not his child.”

“Suppose he were – misled.” Even such an oblique reference to Mama’s deceit made her tongue swell in her mouth. 

“Charis!” 

Her own name, rapped out like a parade ground order, shocked her into turning her head. Sherlock leant in, his lips a bare inch from her face.

“Give King Ambrosine the credit he deserves. No-one could expect to deceive him on an question of breeding, be it dog, horse or human. Nor did he lack pride, or the spirit to avenge an insult. The whole of the three kingdoms knows these things.”

One of Sherlock’s wedding gifts to her had been an armillary sphere, imported from Damascus: an artefact of concentric, independently mobile circles in shining bronze, showing all the movements of the spheres. One flick of a thumb turned the constellations of summer into those of winter. 

He was doing the same thing now, inverting her world with a fierce, ruthless precision. 

“Use your reason, Charis. King Ambrosine esteemed your mother throughout her life and afterwards. He held John close about his person, loaded him with honours, until the final months of his life. Then he entrusted your safety to John over the claims of a hundred – two hundred – men of higher lineage. Does any of that look like the behaviour of an unwitting cuckold?”

“But if the rumours were strong enough to provoke the King your brother to consult the Archbishop –”

Sherlock’s lips curled. “I don’t doubt, at least in part, that Mycroft went through that charade in order to stymie any counter move on my part. I – ah – I confess I have sabotaged more than one proposed marriage treaty by drawing pointed conclusions about the lady’s parentage at some well-chosen moment.”

“Sherlock!” She could see it with horrible clarity.

He exhaled. “The truth is, I feared being tied down. In part from selfishness, but more because I have long sensed a struggle coming for the soul of the three kingdoms. Children are hostages given to fortune in war.”

In a jagged flash of horror, Charis saw a baby, its head dashed open on the stone flags of the castle courtyard. Her hand went to her mouth, and she retched. 

Sherlock extended his hand. “Come.” 

He led her back to the bed. She curled between the lavender-scented sheets. He paced about the room, speaking half to himself, half to her.

“I could not make that choice – not just for myself, but for any wife of mine – if she did not have _at least_ so great a stake in the three kingdoms as I. Charis, I would see you rule in Gondal – a ruler in your own right, as your mother Felicia should have been. Nothing less would make the game worth the candle.”

She had known Sherlock too long; he did not choose words without care, as other men did. And it profited to listen to that which he did _not_ say.

“As my mother should have been? Not as Papa _was_?” 

“I told you tonight was for honesty.” 

There was something febrile in his ceaseless pacing. It fed the building tension within her, so that her nerves jangled and she wanted to scream.

“Then in the name of the Virgin, give me that!”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and took her left hand between his. Her heart started to thud with dread of what was coming.

“Charis, you are not in law a bastard, but when I look at you, I see nothing of King Ambrosine. Your mother, yes, in certain lights and from certain angles. As for the rest: your dominant hand, when you’re not forced to pretend otherwise, is your left. Your eye is as true and your nerve as steady in the hospital as in the hunting field. And otherwise there are a myriad hints and signs which suggest your true parentage. At least, to anyone who does not merely see, but observes.” 

She could not help it. She let out a gasp of pure pain.

As he had done on their wedding night, he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close against his chest. His deep voice purred, inches above her head, barely audible above her erratic breathing.

“Don’t fear what you are. On your mother’s side, you come of the true, senior line of Gondal. Raise your banner in her name, and see how many men of the Borders flock to it. As for King Ambrosine: think, Charis, think. It is near impossible he could have had a cuckoo child palmed off on him. It is – between these four walls – almost as inconceivable that you are of his getting. Yet, you were raised, loved and dowered by him as his own. What other conclusion remains but that he knew all, and was content with it?”

“How could a man –” Charis faltered, but he did not interrupt. “How could a man of honour overlook such a thing?”

“How could any man of honour – or woman, for that matter – rank trivialities about who chooses to share a sweaty bed above keeping James Moriarty off the throne of Gondal?” Sherlock’s voice was watchfires and war trumpets. “A dark devil lurks within the cadet line of the house of Ancona. Gondal was ten times blessed that Crown Prince Gerald never reached the throne. The Pretender is all Prince Gerald threatened to be, and worse. In contriving to promote his wife’s line at the expense of his brother’s, Ambrosine never acted more like a true King.”

Charis’s heart pounded. “Do you _truly_ believe that?”

“Yes.” Unhesitating, uncompromising. “If unchecked, that hydra will not merely spread his poison over every square foot of Gondal. He will unite the three kingdoms and remake them in his own image. Angria is riddled by factions: its King a phthistic figurehead, his heir as yet unbreeched, his brother a dolt, his wife a tool of the Emperor, his sister intriguing with the Palatinate. If Gaaldine did not stand between the Pretender and her, Angria would be over-ripe for his picking. And in Gaaldine, few except Mycroft and I appreciate the risk he presents. And we are but two, and have no heirs.”

 _That_ stabbed at the heart. “But I – you said – we agreed –” 

Sherlock captured her hand, and pressed it briefly against his lips. “My pardon, my lady. That reflection was not directed at you. I had been of full age for a decade and a half when we married. Had I agreed to the first marriage treaty the King and his Council proposed, I could by now be a grandfather.” 

She raised her head from the pillow, turning on her side so that she could see his face. She had never, despite Lord Lestrade’s sly hints and less subtle jibes, thought much about Sherlock’s age. Now she looked, there was, indeed, a network of fine lines around his eyes and across his brow, the marks of too many years scanning horizons, eyes screwed up against the sun’s glare. They showed more plainly now the sun and wind of the last days had tanned his face to a deep brown.

For a moment she wondered what experiences had scarred those long years of his youth and early manhood, before she had even been born, which had led him to pronounce with such bleak austerity on the loneliness of royalty, and counterfeits who passed so very like true coin.

His eyes met hers. She had the uncanny sense once again of his reading her thoughts. This time he ducked his head as if he could not hold her gaze. 

“On the topic of marriage, there is another thing. I, of all men, cannot condemn Queen Felicia for being led by her heart in this.” 

His voice sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. “I would not put this on you now, after the shocks you have already borne, but you _must_ know it before we go any further. I have loved John for more than half my life. He is the best man of this age – pure unalloyed gold, all through – and his bloodline would grace any throne.”

A thousand hints and portents coalesced on the instant, like the resolution of a problem in algebra. _Known to use boys after the manner of the Bulgars._ John was not a boy, nor was her husband. But they had been boys together, long ago, in Gondal, in the hostage time.

She shook off his embrace, sat up in bed, and chose her next words with extreme care. “You love John – as Achilles loved Patroclus?”

Sherlock gave a brief, bitten-off “huff” of laughter. “Well. That’s the politest way I’ve ever heard it described.”

That towering spectre again. _Counterfeiting a woman’s part._ All the fear and frustration of the last few days came to a head at once.

“God and all his saints in glory! Stop talking about your f–” She caught herself just in time. “About your _royal_ grandfather. Hell’s teeth, it’s me you’re married to, not Mycroft the First.”

One heart-beat of silence. Then Sherlock laughed out loud. 

“Idiot. Not you, my lady, me. I’ve been a complete fool and never realised it until this moment.” An odd exhilaration thrummed through his voice. “Well, then, leaving my _fucking_ grandfather entirely out of it, I fell in love with John when I was in exile in Gondal, and believed, on what appeared to be compelling grounds, that when circumstances forced me to leave I would never see him again. I felt – well, I rather suspect you know how I felt.”

Charis hardly paused. “No. No I bloody don’t. This is _John_ we’re talking about. John would never do anything for a base reason. Not like –”

She could not pronounce Lord Lestrade’s name. Not in the same sentence as she spoke of John. _My true father_. _My oldest friend_. _Sherlock’s –what?_

Her husband assumed a most peculiar expression. “No more he could, though I cannot think one woman in ten thousand would have the generosity to admit it. Nor is it misplaced. Please, Charis, whatever I have done, hold John guiltless of everything save excess of love.” 

She tried to digest that, but Sherlock resumed, speaking even more rapidly than normal, as if to deter any attempt at interruption.

“Anyway, having – as I believed – lost the only person who made life worth living, I left the three kingdoms altogether and travelled around Europe. I argued with bishops in Italy, I heard music in Paris, I dissected corpses in Leiden, I attended lectures on optics in London, I fought – well, no matter. If I’d had my wish, I’d not have returned. Only my uncle entered a decline and Mycroft, disappointed in hopes of heirs down his own line, summoned me home to secure his back when the inevitable happened. Politics I could deny; he bolstered them by reference to the safety and happiness of the Queen, our cousin, whose claims I could not. As Mycroft knew.”

Charis wondered, yet again, what had truly gone wrong between the brothers. The mad Queen, Iphigenia, lay close to the heart of it, but the grave had sealed her lips, more surely even than her malady.

“And then?” 

“Then? A decade and a half of limbo, sitting on the lip of a volcano and waiting for wisps of smoke to turn to flame. Unravelling tedious intrigues among even more tedious noble families – occasionally being trusted with minor diplomatic missions – watching the Heir of Gondal start to move his pieces into position, being permitted to make only the most ineffectual moves in response.”

Charis shivered. “After my mother died, Papa was persuaded to recall the Pretender to court. He said, once, if there was any act of his reign he could wish undone, it would be that.” 

_Wide sleeves and skirts of stiff black taffeta: she must still have been in mourning for Mama. The small West audience chamber: a semi-formal, forenoon reception. She on her stool next to Papa’s tall, gilded chair, head bent over her needlework, acutely conscious of being on show, of having to prove to Papa that she was old enough._

_Something caused her to look up. The Pretender was scrutinising her, like one of the Palace cats watching a finch whose wing it had broken, waiting until the bird’s agony grew too boring before delivering the killing strike._

_Her recoil – slight though it was – told him she had marked his attention. He raised a finger to his lips and gave a small, secret smile, as if to seal some private pact between the two of them._

Sherlock nodded, as though reading her thoughts. “The threat of the Pretender made it clear this was the one marriage treaty I could assuredly not refuse. I did not expect it would cause me to be reunited with John, after so many years.” 

That – was not a easy sentence to deal with. She set her teeth and looked straight ahead. A hint of pleading entered Sherlock’s voice.

“But nor did I expect to find in you what I have. Charis, I said earlier that disinterested affection is the rarest prize princes can find. Forgetting Gondal for a moment, if you decide to end this tonight, my greatest sorrow – save one – would be that I only recognised what I had within my grasp at the moment it slipped away.”

“And your _greatest_ sorrow, in such a case?” Her voice seemed to come from very far away.

“Do you have any doubt? That I would no longer have the right or power to stand between you and greedy dolts like Lestrade, who weigh your worth in lands and gold alone.” 

The last few days had left her bruised and wary. She could manage only a weary detachment where perhaps he had hoped for warmth.

“Go on with your tale.” 

“Some months after you’d both arrived in Gaaldine I confronted John with the past. You know he is incapable of untruth. Forced to answer a direct question, he told me I’d been mistaken, that his feelings for me were at least as strong as mine for him.”

She had been wrong. Detachment was an illusion; sick misery crawled in the pit of her stomach. “So you and he – all this time –” 

Sherlock shook his head. “No. I spoke of feelings. Until a few weeks ago, wherever my heart may have been, my body remained true to our marriage vows.”

Charis’ breath came out in a long, ragged gasp. Sherlock reached out and took her chin in his hand, tipping back her head so she had no choice but look into his eyes. They were wide and sincere, but she had early learned her husband could be a master of the players’ art. He saw that thought, too.

“You doubt me? Don’t be misled; there’s more necessity than virtue about it. My nature has always been peculiar. I find it difficult to summon up passion where neither mind nor heart is engaged. Since John _would_ not and the two of us _should_ not, that was an end of that.”

“Until?” He had said “a few weeks ago”; something had changed. She suspected what it must have been, but wanted to hear it from Sherlock’s own lips.

He nodded, gravely. 

“Until the Reaching Beck Bridge. John feared me dead. By the time he found me I was a hunted fugitive, stripped of power, position – all that has ever made me a honeypot to flatterers. John can resist every temptation except those born of excess nobility of spirit.”

Tears did well up, then. How _typical_. How completely, damnably _typical_. 

Sherlock’s brows drew down. “Charis, look. Whatever you decide to do about our marriage, John and I and whatever resources either of us can command will always stand between you and the Pretender. I will _not_ have fear of James of Gondal determine your actions.”

She saw in an instant’s perfect clarity the honourable intent behind Sherlock’s promise and its complete futility.

“Not an army,” she murmured. “An army-in-law.” 

“What?”

“You told me on our wedding night that I now had an army-in-law. Were our bond to be dissolved, would the King of Gaaldine deploy his armies against the Pretender of Gondal on my behalf?”

He did, for a moment, have the grace to look ashamed. “Not unless it was in his own self-interest. And not, therefore _on your behalf_. Unless, of course, you were his Queen.”

Charis drew in a sharp breath. Sherlock nodded.

“I’m afraid so. He loves Elizabeth with a passion more sincere than anything I have ever seen in him. Nonetheless, were you to be rendered suddenly single, he would head the queue to marry you. He would conceive his duty to Gaaldine demanded it.” 

Charis closed her eyes. She stood in some high place; the three kingdoms unrolled before her. Forts, bridges, strong points, ports, passes, trading centres. A woman’s hands – she did not recognise them, the fingers were slender and white, unlike Mama’s stubby, comforting fingers – offered her a chatelaine, its ring heavy with keys. But the woman’s finger ends were dipped in blood. It had dried black underneath her nails. On her wrist was a fetter of wrought gold, from which led a chain of adamant, off into the mists beyond her vision.

Her eyes snapped open.

“No.”

“What?”

“Tell me, Sherlock, even if I did raise Mama’s banner, who would join me unless I had a general capable of meeting the Pretender in open battle? And can you think of a single such general who would not expect marriage as his price?”

His pause told her all she needed to know. Anger lent heat to her words.

“Then what does dissolving our marriage do, but put Gondal up for auction, with my body thrown in for makeweight?”

He blinked. “An – unnervingly – accurate summary of the position.”

“Well, why didn’t you say?”

He sounded aggrieved. “John told me not to. He wanted to ensure you had a free choice, not one constrained by fear. He also told me to make clear that if your choice was to retire into private life – to marry where you chose, political considerations quite irrelevant – that I would do nothing to dissuade you.”

Her voice came out with the force of a whip-crack. “So the mothers of bastard sons press them towards the throne, but the fathers of bastard daughters thrust them away?” 

Her hand went to her mouth, as though she could call the words back. 

Sherlock’s eyes blazed with fierce joy. “Ah! I _knew_ I should have smuggled you into Corbisdale Castle. It would have been instructive for you to meet David. And vice versa.” 

Something eased, like the release of a too-tight stay. “You truly think _I_ can rule Gondal.” It was not a question. 

“Yes. As David could never have ruled Gaaldine.” Sherlock’s lips curved sardonically. “Even if Mycroft or I had been stupid enough to give him the chance. Not that the Pretender will be an easy man to unseat, either, though the mess you left at Castle Lestrade may help. The Pretender will never forgive that idiot for having had you in his power and then _losing_ you.”

“Oh, God. Sally –”

Sherlock nodded. “Though her family have fast ships and trading posts from here to Cathay. He’d be wise to marry her at once, and run. Exile with his merchant adventuress in the Spice Islands would be a far kinder fate than whatever the Pretender plans for him. In the next day or two – at the latest – Castle Lestrade will be in James of Gondal’s hands. The saints help that mountebank if he lets his master find him there.”

“Oh!” Inspiration struck. “Wait a moment.”

She rose from the bed and ran to the outer room. Phyllis must have sent someone down the _The Mariner’s Rest_ to collect her saddle-bags. There they lay against the wall, still laced and buckled. She knelt beside them.

“Here,” she said, a trifle breathlessly on her return. Sherlock was leaning against the casement, looking across at the ancient tower again, an unreadable expression on his face. 

“I don’t know why I brought them, but – well, they took hours, and it seemed a shame to leave them there. Anyway, here.”

She thrust a tight roll of papers into his hand. He started to skim them in the moonlight, then went to the writing desk in the corner, and lit the reading candles, using a taper kindled from the night-lamp. 

After a few moments he lifted his head, and laughed. “Oh, the lackwit, the lackwit. He _really_ didn’t know what he was getting, did he? As I said earlier, you are the only woman I could bear to be married _to_.”

“Actually, you didn’t. Say that, I mean.”

Sherlock looked, obscurely, ruffled. “Well, I certainly _meant_ to.”

Which, of course, was Sherlock all over. 

Abruptly Charis realised what it would have cost her to give him up. 

“I do not wish to dissolve our marriage,” she said, very formally. “I would very much hope we might have a better understanding from now forward.”

“And John? Have you a message for him?”

This was harder than she had hoped. Was she doubly betrayed by John, or doubly protected? He could not have told her of her true birth without betraying Mama’s trust. Nor could she blame him for setting out to find Sherlock, when she herself had ordered him to do so.

As for the rest – had she ever, truly, hoped to come first with Sherlock? Even the nuns had – obliquely – warned her of this sort of thing. Whatever rules applied to women, fidelity was not a quality much prized among princes.

“Tell John – he has been my support and protector for as long as I have known him. Tell him it would grieve me more than I could say were anything to change that.”

The delight in Sherlock’s face tore a jagged-edged wound in her chest. She sealed the pain away. Jealousy was not a luxury Gondal could afford. What was needed now was to move forward, to rebuild – no, to build anew, on foundations which, for the first time, had been rooted into the living rock.

She reached up to her hair, removing the pins which had secured it for the bath, letting it fall down about her shoulders.

“Jonathan said he saw you raise your head in the flood below the bridge, but it’s been hard having no sure word of you. How have you managed?” 

She ran her fingers over the back of Sherlock’s right hand, where it lay carelessly on the desk. He had always been spare of flesh, and perhaps the constant sight of Lord Lestrade’s sleek, well-fed face had heightened the contrast. Nevertheless, her earlier thought of him as a man who had emerged from prolonged privations lingered.

He tilted his head, as though surprised at her asking. “Not badly, I assure you. Of course, it’s summer and there are fairs and festivals up and down the Borders. Between us we have enough skills to earn a disreputable thaler or two. I draw teeth – I have a remarkable knack for it, you should see me – and John treats sore eyes. And I play the fiddle for country weddings and the like.”

The candles caught a glint of white as he smiled, though his voice stung with underlying bitterness.

“Doubtless, when he cut me loose, my brother the King calculated I’d spent long enough playing the mountebank for fun that I’d not starve if called upon to do so for a living.” He looked down at the papers resting on the desk. “Oh, damn! I shall have to come to life again. These must be in Mycroft’s hands as soon as maybe, and that means using the Royal messenger service. He’ll know it has to be me.”

“Me,” Charis said indignantly, pointing at the acanthus, and then, “Oh, God. My reputation.”

Sherlock coughed, drily. “My esteemed brother is nothing if not practical. If he thought it would win him intelligence as good as this, he’d have you elope with every Gondalian lord in turn.”

She glared at him. If he dared to treat it as a joke –

He had the grace to look contrite, if by the barest fraction. “Did you not wonder why half a hundred of Mycroft’s men weren’t in Cavron already, demanding to know what’d become of you? You’ve Phyllis and Annie to thank. They’ve told everyone you’ve been on a pilgrimage to St Cecilia’s Well and various shrines of a similar nature, under the care of a widowed gentlewoman of unimpeachable reputation. I adore widowed gentlewomen of unimpeachable reputation; they’re all such thunderingly good liars.”

She retreated back to the bed, and pulled the sheet around her. “What? You can’t expect Mycroft to believe a taradiddle like that!”

Her husband blew out the candles on the writing desk; the scent of warm beeswax filled her nostrils. “No more he won’t. No more will the Castellan, for that matter, once he gets back. No more will Colonel Wardlaw, with whom, by the way, I shall have to have words. No, better: I’ll tell Mycroft to do it. Wardlaw has _no_ business stripping the defences of Cavron without your knowledge or direct orders.”

Charis gasped. “And me? What about my reputation? You’re not going to fight a duel with Lord Lestrade, surely?”

“Why on earth should I? I can out-think the buffoon in any area he chooses to name, but he’s a good ten years younger, and has the reputation of being more than handy with a blade. Besides, nothing harms a lady’s reputation as much as some fool man putting his neck on the line to defend it. Phyllis and Annie have done us both a favour beyond price. No, let’s leave Lestrade out of this altogether.”

He walked across the bedroom, to the music stand against which her mandolin was propped. 

“What is that saying Horace is so fond of? _All can be taken in stride, if you just sing it to the right tune_. For the moment, until I make my peace with Mycroft, you are an outlaw’s lady. Which means I’ve only an outlaw’s portion to offer you: my hawk, my hound and my good right arm. Oh, and my fiddle, to charm the birds from the trees and sing you to sleep by the rushing brook.”

He strummed a chord or two on the mandolin. “The song almost writes itself, doesn’t it? Actually, Phyllis let me up through the servants’ stair, but I rather think I’ll scale the fortress wall. In the song, I mean. Unless you’d prefer to let down your long fair hair, to help me along a bit?”

“Ouch,” Charis said. Then, getting into the spirit of the thing, “I don’t mind dangling a rope from the frame of my casement, if that would do?”

“The very thing. _She wove him a rope of the finest silk/Its strands more white than any milk._ I apologise for the rhyme, but if the ballad of how the fair lady defied the King and ran to the greenwood with her exiled husband is going to be picked up through the length and breadth of the Borders, there’s no point in giving them Agathon. I’ll put a dying fall on _any_ , perhaps. That should get the tears flowing.”

“A silk rope sounds terribly expensive. And impracticable.”

“Oh, quite. You’d get hardly any grip at all. Still, the silk bit allows me to make favourable comparisons with the lady’s hair.”

“I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if my hair _had_ turned milk-white,” Charis said feelingly. “I’ve had shocks enough for it.”

He changed key. “Actually, it’s been bleached in pale gold streaks by the sun. It rather suits you.”

There was nothing, really, she could say to that. She lay back on the bed, luxuriating in its peace after so many shocks, eyes half-closed, listening to Sherlock picking out the tune, going back and forward, trying out rhymes and broken phrases.

_Safe._

“When you perform a piece of music, it’s always new,” Sherlock observed at length. “You know the notes, but each time the piece brings out something different in you, something there’s never been in it before, informed by all the times you’ve played that piece before, or heard it played.”

He left the mandolin against the music stand, and swung himself up on the bed beside her. “Charis. May I come to you this night as your husband in truth?”

There was an odd, husky note in his voice which struck deep inside of her. _Like the night the Bishop’s bravos jumped us, in the lane in Brendelhame._

A few breadths of finest lawn were all that stood between her hot skin and his. Whatever she had felt when watching Lord Lestrade in the lists or being kissed by him on the summit of the pass into Gondal was a pale, cold echo compared to the flare inside her now.

“Oh. Oh God.” A half-stifled gasp of assent: she could manage nothing more. 

Sherlock sat up, pulling his half-fastened shirt off over his head, leaving him naked to the waist. Details of his body struck her as they never had before: the sharp planes of his muscles outlined in the moonlight of the bedroom, the light dusting of dark hair over chest and abdomen, trailing down beneath the waistline of his breeches, drawing her thoughts shamefully, inescapably with it. 

She had dreamt of a moment like this.

She was not dreaming now.

“Please – yes – oh – yes.”

His lips covered hers, his tongue teasing its way into her mouth, his hands drifting down her body, tracing and cupping her breasts. 

It became, suddenly, impossible to breathe. Her thoughts shattered into splinters.

His hand reached lower and found the secret place between her legs. With his thumb, he did something deft: utterly shameful and yet utterly blissful. Pleasure pierced her, almost as intense as pain. She bit her lip. How could anyone stand this? How could anyone stand for it to stop?

“Charis –”

The break in his voice did for her entirely. All was changed, not merely inside her but in the whole world. It must be, if Sherlock could sound so.

“Yes –?”

He did not answer, but rolled out of her grasp. Disappointment sliced through her like a blade. Then she saw his hands were at the lacings of his breeches. A moment later he lay naked on the bed. 

So _that_ was a cockstand. Her face flamed. Sneaked glances into the _armarium prohibitum_ , when the Palace librarian was elsewhere, had supplemented the bawdy hints of the hospital tarts and the franker comments of the Palace ladies. Still, the thing in the flesh was both so like and so utterly alien to how she had imagined – also, how on earth was it supposed to _fit_?

A trifle queasily, she recalled Beatrice’s dark hints, on Charis’s visit of state the morning after Beatrice’s wedding – of course, Beatrice had always been the sort to treat a thorn in her hand like the loss of an arm –

“Straddle me.” The command curled off her husband’s tongue: challenging, lazy and sensuous.

“What –?” 

“Straddle me.” Laughter threaded his voice. “Charis. Don’t look so shocked. You’re a woman – we’re married – to each other. The situation is extraordinary as it is. A scruple added on the side of convention might unman me entirely. Humour me.”

“But – the nuns told us we were on no account to fall into the sin of Lilith.”

An instruction which would have been as baffling as it was disquieting, had Agnes not visited a married, indiscreet sister and returned with enlightenment.

Sherlock curled his lip in disgust. “I’ve mentioned before, if there’s one place your nuns have absolutely _no_ business, it’s our marriage bed.”

A fleeting image of Mother Superior, perched vulture-like on the bedpost, crossed Charis’s mind. 

“Why take something meant for pleasure and turn all to pain and duty?” Sherlock’s fingertip circled her right nipple; she let out a half-stifled gasp.

“But –”

 _But pleasure is for men_. That, too, had been the tenor of the nuns’ instructions. Sherlock, as ever, decoded the unspoken thought.

“Big Gertie said once, if it weren’t for wives being convinced they had to take it flat on their backs, in silence, her income wouldn’t be a tithe of what it is.” He eyed her, and added, a little stiffly, “She told me, also, many girls find it much easier, the first time, to be on top.” 

“You asked _Big Gertie_ that?”

“Why muddle through with improvisation, when there’s expertise close at hand?”

There were no words to tell him how absurd he was. How absurd and yet so dear. No other man in all the three kingdoms – not in all the world, for all she knew, nor in all the worlds now and to come – could come anywhere close. 

It had, almost certainly, never occurred to Sherlock that there was anything at all odd in asking the advice of Gaaldine’s most notorious madam on the best way to deflower virgins to ensure maximum comfort and convenience for both parties. Or, for that matter, in telling the virgin in question he had done so.

And now he was lying there, looking put out, like a cat who had had its fur rubbed up the wrong way, and yet, catlike again, maintaining a bone-deep air of complacency.

If only something could shake his assurance! 

That way he was lying, leaving himself utterly exposed – and she’d always suspected he was ticklish –

She dived across the bed before the impulse could leave her. In the course of the next few seconds she discovered the following: Sherlock was _very_ ticklish, if you caught him in the right spot; he was far stronger than she had expected; and he had absolutely _no_ scruples about fighting fair.

She landed, winded on her back. For a moment Sherlock was on top of her, his big hands pinning her shoulders to the mattress, the weight of his cockstand pressing into her thigh. For a second her spirit quailed.

Then he hooked her behind the knee with one foot and flipped them both over. She landed on top of him, their faces mere inches apart.

He lay back, utterly silent, staring up at her, challenging her to make the next move. Only the barest rim of iris showed round his dilated pupils. His lips were parted, inviting her kiss. It struck Charis, not for the first time, how unfair it was that a man should have been gifted by nature with such perfectly shaped and tinted lips –

“Well?” she said breathlessly, a few moments later, “I’m straddling you. So, what next?”

His eyes widened even further. He reached down, between their bodies. There was that piercing pleasure again, but this time she felt something else, like an itch that desperately needed relief.

“Go on. Now. Please.”

* * *

She woke. She was alone in the bed. Sunlight slanted in through the open casement. Outside, the rhythms of the daytime castle continued as they always had, as if she had never been away.

She turned and stretched, savouring a delicious lassitude in her limbs, the satiated ache of exercise – and, she thought with a small, secret smile, rather more than exercise. Her out-flung hand hit something on the pillow which crackled beneath the light pressure. 

She rolled over and secured the paper, holding it up to the sunlight.

On the paper, written in black ink in her husband’s characteristic spidery hand, were the words, “Hold Cavron until I come here again.”


End file.
